Auble and Franks (1978) found that a process termed "effort toward comprehension" was important in facilitating recall of sentences. Four experiments were conducted to further elucidate the nature of this process. Two hypotheses were considered: (1) Effort toward comprehension involves greater elaboration or deeper processing of the sentence; (2) effort toward comprehension can be viewed as an "aha" experience (i.e., a state of noncomprehension followed by comprehension of the sentencel. Results indicated that recall was significantly greater for subjects in conditions producing "aha" reactions. No support was found for the elaboration interpretation of effort toward comprehension. Auble and Franks (1978) present fmdings that indicate that a process termed "effort toward comprehension" can facilitate later recall. Using generally incomprehensible sentences and appropriate cues that render the sentences comprehensible, Auble and Franks (Experiment 2) found that presentation of a sentence followed by an appropriate cue facilitated recall relative to a condition in which the cue was meaningfully embedded in the sentence. This effect was attributed to processes involving differential degrees of effort toward comprehension. Further, in the former condition, in which the sentence and cue were presented separately, it was discovered that extra time during acquisition enhanced later recall, although extra time was not effective in the latter condition (Experiments I and 3). Auble and Franks (Experiment 4) also found that eventual compre· hension of the sentence was necessary for the process of effort toward comprehension to be effective in facilitating recall. Given these initial demonstrations, the purpose of the present studies is to more closely examine the nature of the processes involved in effort toward comprehension. Two possible mechanisms that could underly this process will be considered.The first possible mechanism will be termed the elaboration hypothesis. In this view, a greater amount of effort toward comprehension might be seen as related to or involving elaboration or deeper processing of the sentence (Craik & Lockhart, 1972;Craik & Tulving, 1975). Auble and Franks (1978, Experiments 1 and 2) discussed both elaborative processes occurring between the sentence and cue and elaborative processes occurring after the entire sentence-eue combination. Although these two potential types of elaborative processes couldThis research was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant BNS 77-07248, awarded to Jeffery Franks and John Bransford. The authors wish to express their thanks to Denise Wunderlich for her help in conducting and analyzing these experiments. not be distinguished on the basis of their results, it was found that longer time intervals were effective in promoting recall relative to conditions that received no time. This fmding suggests that the underlying processes may involve some type of elaboration. That is, when a sentence and a cue are presented separately, subjects elaborate the sente...

This article provides an overview for three sets of experiments that examine differences in the way that academically successful and less successful fifth-grade students approach the problem of learning new information. The overview includes discussions of (a) theoretical approaches to the problem of learning new information, (b) pilot studies that suggest differences in successful and less successful students' approaches to learning, and (c) specific hypotheses about reasons for the differences in learning suggested by the pilot studies. We also describe how these hypotheses will be tested in the three sets of experiments that follow this article.

Four experiments examined free recall of generally incomprehensible sentences with appropriate cues that made the sentences comprehensible. A distinction is made between processes involved in an effort toward comprehension and elaboration processes that occur following comprehension. It was found that providing additional time for effort toward comprehension enhanced recall, while providing additional time for elaboration following comprehension did not enhance recall. It was also shown that the effects of effort toward comprehension were contingent upon eventual understanding of the sentence.The present experiments were designed to extend previous research on the effect of comprehending a stimulus and to clarify the effects of elaboration of a stimulus in relation to comprehension. The question to be addressed is whether the effects of elaboration are contingent on where or how comprehension occurs.Several studies have shown the importance for later recall of comprehending a stimulus. For example, Marks and Miller (1964) and Schulman (1974) showed that meaningful stimuli are better recalled than nonsensical stimuli. It was also demonstrated by Bransford and Johnson (1972) and Bransford and McCarrell (1974) that even potentially meaningful stimuli are better recalled in the presence of appropriate contextual information. Johnson, Doll, Bransford, and Lapinski (1974) showed that generally incomprehensible sentences were recalled less well if subjects received an inappropriate context or no context than if they received appropriate contexts.

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Two studies examined the cognitive units of sentence memory using a perceptual recognition task. Four candidate cognitive units were considered: concepts, propositions, integrated propositions, and nonintegrated propositions. Subjects first received a list of acquisition sentences and then were asked to reproduce sentences presented under a white-noise mask. These masked sentences were replicas of the acquisition sentences, were formed of recombined clauses from the acquisition sentences, or were formed of recombined words from the acquisition sentences. Reproduction accuracy was employed as the dependent measure. Results supported propositions (operationalized by clauses) as cognitive units of episodic memory. No conclusive evidence was obtained for concepts, integrated propositions, or nonintegrated propositions as cognitive units. The utility of perceptual recognition tasks for studying the cognitive units of episodic memory is discussed. Recently, Hannigan, Shelton, Franks, & Bransford (1980) have examined the role of episodic and semantic memory factors (cf. Tulving, 1972) in facilitating the perceptual recognition of sentences masked by white noise. In this work, experimental groups were presented a list of seemingly unrelated sentences as acquisition materials. These sentences could be made to seem interrelated through knowledge of a framework that gave each of them a more specific contextual meaning. One group of subjects was given the framework during acquisition (framework group). A second group was only presented with the sentences (no-framework group). It was hypothesized that presentation of the sentences would result in encoded episodic representations of the information in the sentences. Knowledge of the framework, however, was expected to add higher order semantic knowledge structures within which episodic information would be organized.Following acquisition, the effects of these episodic and semantic factors on perceptual recognition were assessed (cf. Jacoby & Dallas, in press). The perceptual recognition task consisted of presenting sentences masked by white noise and asking subjects to reproduce the sentences. Two types of test sentences were old sentences (which were actually presented during acquisition) and novel-appropriate sentences (which were This work was supported in part by a National Science Foundation predoctoral fellowship (SMI772098l) to Pamela M. Auble. The authors wish to express their thanks to Tommie Slayden and Kate Bergmann for their help in designingand conducting the experiments. We would also like to thank Chuck Clifton, James Neely, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments and criticism of an earlier draft of this paper. Requests for reprints should be sent to Jeffery J. Franks, Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 37240. not previously presented but did fit the framework provided during acquisition). It was found that both the framework and no-framework groups were more accurate in reproducing old sentences than a contro...