Some effects of titles on building and recalling text structures
Michael Bock · Discourse Processes · 1980
Could different titles cause different structures to be set up for the very same text material? To pursue this question, we performed an experiment requiring a sorting task. Subjects were given 18 sentences from a text, each one printed on a separate card, and were asked to put them in order. Then they were asked to reproduce the sentences. The order in which sentences were placed and reproduced should reveal the “subjective” structure of the text. The sentences which fit a given title were placed and reproduced earlier in the sequence than those which didn't fit. The goodness of fit was measured here by the shared arguments. The goodness of fit also influenced sentence recall. These results are compatible with Haviland and Clark (1974) and Kintsch (1974), but not with Rumelhart's (1975) story grammar.