Sentences in lists and in connected discourse

The recent deluge of published sutdies employing sentences or connected discourse as the unit of study has left the question of whether the two types of materials are essentailly similar or importantly different unsolved. An understanding of this issue is crucial to theory, since the existence of major psychological differences between the comprehension, learning, and memory of sentence lists and connected discourse would make a unified theory covering both types of materials exceedingly difficult to formulate. While offering no final resolution of the issue, the present paper examines the evidence, considers the implications of several major theoretical developments, and poses questions amenable to experimentation. It is hoped that the paper will serve as a springboard to a higher level of understanding of how people process these two common types of experimental materials. Sentences Sentences in Lists and in Connected Discourse2 The last few years have seen a marked trend in the literature of experimental psychology toward the study of the comprehension, learning, and memory of connected discourse. The recent surge of interest seems to have begun with papers by Fillenbaum (1966) and Sachs (1967), but the area is not exactly new to psychology. Ebbinghaus (1885) himself studied discourse learning and reported that he needed only one-tenth the number of repetitions to learn a passage of prose (from "Don Juan") as he did to learn a list of nonsense syllables equal in length to the number of syllables in the prose. Binet and Henri (1894) reported a series of studies on discourse memory with children which showed great insight and anticipated several of the major themes of recent experimental work. Although the tradition of discourse experiments is far older, recent developments have caused the swift formation of a literature and tradition of experiments on sentences in unrelated lists. The event which marks the beginning of the heyday of sentence list experiments was the creation of the discipline of psycholinguistics. Early experiments with sentence lists (e.g., Mehler, 1963; Miller, 1962) and most since then have been concerned with attempting to test experimentally the psychological validity of linguistic concepts such as transformational complexity (Chomsky, 1957, 1965) or Yngve depth (1960). While the study of sentences qua sentences is certainly justifiable on its own merits, the relationship between this newer experimental material and connected discourse remains unclear. Deese (1961) considered the even broader question of the relationship of experimental materials "from the isolated verbal unit to connected discourse," but, unfortunately,