Syntactic influences in the recall of sentences in prose

Improving Comprehension for Jury Instructions

“…Yet, one researcher has found passive sentences to be recalled better than active ones (Wearing, 1973), and several researchers found no differences between these two types of sentences (Blount & Johnson, 1971;Wearing, 1970). Blount and Johnson used sentences in the context of paragraphs and that factor could explain the findings.…”