Grammatical Structure and the Recall of Sentences in Prose

Abstract

By far the largest amount of teaching activity in educational settings involves telling things to students, whether orally or in print [Carroll, 1968, p. 1] . Surprisingly, only recently has there been much interest in variables influencing learning from written or spoken discourse. Carrol (1968) stated: It is no wonder...(that) there has been difficulty in applying learning theory to the analysis of teaching. Even when we consider the field of what is know in the trade as learning, we find that the interest is primarily in how well people can learn lists of arbitrary verbal associations and in what factors influence this kind of learning. A huge gap exists in our theories of learning if they cannot properly explain the process of learning from meaningful discourse [p. 1]. In the investigation to be reported, an examination was made of the influence of two learning' variables on the learning of prose. The noun that is the grammatical subject of a sentence is defined by its structural, or syntactic, position in the sentence. However, the grammatical subject may not always be the logical or psychological subject. For example, the grammatical subject of a sentence composed in the active voice becomes the grammatical object when the sentence is transformed to the passive voice. The relationship between the psychological and grammatical subject, in the