Remembering of prose: Holistic or piecemeal losses?

Abstract

According to B. R. Gomulicki (1956, Acta Psychologica, 12, 77–94), as passages lengthen, the abstractive process in forgetting results in deletions or “omissions that progress from single adjectives, through short descriptive phrases, to longer phrases which are only incidental to the main theme”. Here, five experiments are reported which test the idea that the unit of omission in longer passages is the phrase rather than the individual word. Analyses of the remembering of words within a phrase, as compared with word pairings drawn from two different phrases, provided evidence on the respective incidences of holistic and independent remembering of words. Independent remembering of words was evident when learners had the contextual support of surrounding text. Holistic remembering, in contrast, was evident primarily when retrieval demands were high and rememberings were scored for gist.