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limar learning o. 1942, sitions, blank in free recall 1 Psychology, glcichzcitiger 'hologie, 1902, Tor repeated ly Journal of 14-25. ons in short- | Psychology, í svords: An [Psychological , C, K. Pro- ¡n short-term E and Verbal of intraserial h and recall. y, 1968, 77, activating cognitive contexts is discussed, The present paper sketches a general ap- proach to some problems of comprehension * and memory. Several studies are reported which employ an experimental paradigm that seems particularly adaptable to such problems and that has been useful in developing the point of view proposed here. 3 Probably the most well-developed approach to comprehension stems from theories based 4 on transformational — linguistics (eg, . Chomsky, 1957, 1965, 1968; Postal, 1964). j Sentences are assumed to have both super- % ficial and underlying (deep) structures. The ; surface structure characterizes the phonolo- 3 gical shape of the sentence, but the deep 4 structural information is presumed necessary for characterizing sentence meaning (see Katz 8 Postal, 1964). According to Katz $ Postal (p. 12), the semantically interpreted deep structural relations underlying sentences constitute a full analysis of their cognitive meaning. Comprehension thus involves the recovery and interpretation of the abstract deep structural relations underlying sentences, , Y This research was supported in part by a Research Foundation of the State University of New York summer research fellowship to the second author, Senior authorship was decided by tossiog a coin. We wish to thank Brian O'Callaghan, guidance counselor, and the students of Ward Melville High School, East Setauket, New York, for their cooperation. Copyright € 1972 by Academic Press, Inc, All rights of reproduction in any forar reserved, JOURNAL OF VERBAL LEARNING AND VERBAL BEHAVIOR 11, 717-726 (1972) 4 Contextual Prerequisites for Understanding: Some Investigations of Comprehension and Recall! JoHN D. BRANSFORD AND MARCIA K. JOHNSON : í State University of New York, Stony Brook, New York 11790 The present paper presents a series of studies showing that relevant contextual knowledge is a prerequisite for comprehending prose passages. Four studics are reported, each demon- strating increased comprehension ratings and recall scores when Ss were supplied with appropriate information before they heard test passages. Supplying Ss with the same information subsequent to the passages produced much lower comprehension ratings and recall scores. Various explanations of the results are considered, and the role of topics in and sentence memory involves retention of the deep structural but not necessarily the surface structural forms. Many studies have demonstrated the importance of deep structure in sentence perception and memory tasks (e.g., Bever, Lackner, £ Kirk, 1969; Blumen- thal, 1967, Blumenthal $: Boakes, 1967; Perfetti, 1969; Rohrman, 1968; Sachs, 1967; Wanner, 1968). However, several lines of research support the notion that performance in comprehension and memory tasks has a broader base than simply the semantically interpreted deep structural relations underlying linguistic in- puts. Kintsch (1972), for example, has shown that 55 often know more than a sentence specifies directly. The results of experiments by Bransford and Franks (1971), Bransford, Barclay, and Franks (1972) and by Johnson, Bransford, $ Solomon (in press) indicate that the information Ss use in a sentence memory task may originate from the integration of information from several related sentences and may include ideas not directly expressed in the acquisition materials. For example, Johnson, Bransford, and Solomon (in press) presented Ss with short passages like either (a) “The river was narrow. A beaver hit the log that a turtle was sitting beside and the log flipped over from the shock. The turtle was very surprised by the event” m7 718 or (b) “The river was narrow. A beaver hit the log that a turtle was sitting on and the log flipped over from the shock. The turtle was very surprised by the event.” After acquisition, the Ss were read a list of recogni- tion sentences and asked to indicate which sentences they had actually heard during the acquisition task. Those Ss hearing passage (b) were much more likely to think they had heard the novel sentence, “A beaver hit the log and knocked the turtle into the water,” than those hearing passage (a). The Ss under- standing of the acquisition sentences appar- ently involved a realization of the probable consequences of the situations suggested by the input sentences; Ss frequently thought they had heard information which could only have been ¡inferred. The experiments mentioned above lend considerable support to the idea that Ss do not simply interpret and store the meanings of sentences per se. Rather, Ss create semantic products that are a joint function of input information and prior knowledge, The present paper focuses directly on the role played by prior knowledge in comprehension. Its purpose is to show that net only is prior knowledge reflected in the Ss performance in tasks involving the comprehension of linguistic information, but that certain knowledge may be necessary for the meaningful processing of the information in the first place. In the experiments presented below, the availability of prior knowledge is manipulated in order to assess its influence on Ss” ability to compre- hend and remember linguistic materials. EXPERIMENT 1 The information presented to the Ss con- sisted of a passage in which the sentences followed rules of normal English construction and the vocabulary items were used in non- metaphorical ways. The prediction tested was that Ss who received the appropriate pre- requisite knowledge would be able to compre- hend the passage quite easily, and hence would BRANSFORD AND JOHNSON subsequently be able to recall it relatively well. On the other hand, Ss who did not have access to the appropriate knowledge should find the passage difficult to understand and recall. The prerequisite knowledge was in the form of a picture that provided information about the context underlying the stimulus passage. The passage did not simply describe the contextual picture, but instead described various events that could happen given the context as a conceptual base. Method The experiment consisted of an acquisition phase, followed by two tasks—comprehension rating and * recall. There were five independent groups of Ss with 10 Ss per group. In addition to the No Context (1) Ss en». 2 Fig, 1. Appropriate context picture for Experiment L. (who simply heard the passage) an Ss (who saw the appropriate co they heard the passage), there wer of Ss. Context After Ss first heard saw the appropriate picture. Sincs contextual information is necess process of comprehension, the C expected to assign lower compre recall Jess than the Context Befor Ss were shown a picture befc presented. The partial context pi ihe objects represented in the picture, but the objects were assumed that the availability o ations of the objects would be Context and Context Before g comprehension and recall perfor group were expected to be low among the objects in the partia stituted an inappropriate con passage. Finally, No Context (2 twice. This group was included repetitions in the absence of cor o A | 720 they could. The Context Before and Partial Context Ss were given 30 seconds to inspect their respective pictures before the start of the recorded passage. The No Context (2) group heard the same recording twice. After acquisition, there was a 2-minute delay before Ss rated the passage. During this interval, Ss received recall sheets, Context After Ss were allowed 30 sec. to inspect the appropriate picture, and instructions about how to use the comprehension scale were given. Ar seven-point scale was used, with 1 indicating the passage was very difficult to comprehend, 4 indicating moderate, and 7 indicating very easy. Immediately after the rating task, Ss were asked to recall the passage as accurately as they could and were told that if they 4.19, p <.005. The Ss ín the Con- text Before condition also recalled a greater number of ideas than Ss in each of the other four conditions; all values of d(5, 45) > 4.12, Pp =.005. An inspection of the data in Table 1 suggests that, relative to the No Context (1) condition, hearing the passage twice, receiving the context after or receiving the partial context before, increased comprehension ratings somewhat. Relative to the No Context (1) condition, these manipulations had little effect on recall scores. Discussion The presentation of the appropriate seman- tic context had a marked effect on both comprehension ratings and recall. All Ss presumably knew the lexical meanings of the words and were familiar with the sentence structures used in the passage. Comprehension ratings and recall were relatively low, how- ever, when Ss did not receive the appropriate context before they heard the passage, The large difference in recall between the Context Before and the No Context (1) groups could be due to various factors. For example, knowledge of the appropriate context could TABLE 1 MEAN CoMPREBENSION RATINGS AND MEAN NUMBER OF IDEAS RECALLED, EXPERIMENT I No context No context Context Partial Context Maximum wm le) afier context before score Comprehension 2.30 (.30" 3.60 (27) 3.30 (45) 3.70 (56) 6.10 (.38) 7 Recall 3.60 (.64) 3.80 (.79) 3.60 (.75) 4.00 (60) 8.00 (65) 14 * Standard error in parentheses, sin to ex] ide - pa Ce to ide the pic to suj rec pre Th the pa: of pa pri the rel pre suj abl col and the ch group For both Dunnett's xt Bofore jur condi- re higher in in each alues of the Con- a greater the other )> 4.12, h Table 1 ntext (1) receiving e partial 'ehension Context lhad little e seman- on both All Ss nings of sentence ehension 'w, how- propriate e. 'een the ) groups example, xt could aximam score MM ¿ | ¡ orton at o A PREREQUISITES FOR UNDERSTANDING 721 simply provide information that allowed Ss to generate (at recall) ideas based on pre- experimental experiences, and many of these ideas could have overlapped with those in the passage. If this were an important factor, the Context After Ss should also have been able to augment recall by guessing or generating ideas from the picture. Providing the Ss with the appropriate context after they heard the passage did not, however, produce an incre- ment in recall, One might also argue that the Context Before group benefited from a more available set of retrieval cues (i.e., the elements of the picture—balloons, wire, window, etc.) relative to the No Context group. There are data to suggest that retrieval cues are important for recall and that itis important that these cues be present at input (e.g., Tulving £ Osler, 1968). The elements of the picture were available to the Partial Context Ss before they heard the passage, yet their recall was far below that of the Context Before group. What the ¡ partial context picture lacked was the appro- ? priate information about the relations among the concrete elements. Understanding the relations in the appropriate context was a prerequisite for understanding the events suggested by the passage. Although consider- able research is needed to assess the relative contributions of comprehension vesus retrieval processes to remembering, it seems clear that there is little reason to expect retrieval cues to augment recall for prose appreciably if Ss have not understood the meaning of a passage. On the other hand, comprehension per se does not necessarily guarantee subsequent recall. Pilot studies using the passage in Experiment 1 indicate that recall scores for the Context Before Ss can be increased by supplying them with key words as retrieval cues. The comparison of the No Context (2) and Context Before groups can be viewed as a transfer of training design, where the No Context (2) group receives Learn A, Learn A, Test A and the Context Before group receives Learn B, Learn A, Test A where Learn B represents time taken to study the prerequisite context. For Ss in the present experiment, it was more beneficial to transfer from B to A than it was to spend time trying to learn A. Generally, this should be the case ifthe context in question is truly a prerequisite for compre- hension. The finding that neither Context After, nor Partial Context, nor No Context (2) groups showed augmented recall relative to No Con- text (1) Ss was somewhat surprising, although these groups were expected to be clearly inferior to the Context Before group. Even- tually, it will be important to characterize those situations under which these types of treatments will benefit the Ss* performance. For present purposes, however, the major points are the clear advantage of the Context Before group and the resulting picture of the comprehension process that is supported by the general pattern of the results. In Experiment T, it was very unlikely that the appropriate prerequisite context was (in all its details) part of the preexperimental know- ledge of the Ss. If one generally characterizes comprehension as a process requiring appro- priate semantic contexts, then the conditions under which existing structures become activated are extremely important. Ifa passage does not provide sufficient cues about its appropriate semantic context, the S is ina problem-solving situation in which he must find a suitable organization of his store of previous knowledge. Experiments ll, LIL, and TV involve materials for which the appropriate contexts should be part of the preexperi- mental knowledge of most Ss. Some Ss are given a cue (a topic for the passage) that should help activate a suitable context. Tt should be noted that the experiments to follow are similar to a set of studies that became available in the literature at the time the present paper was being written: Dooling and Lachman (1971) found that providing the topic of a passage affected subsequent recall. The present studies are included here, however, because (a) the passages used are y should De | aer the passage was read, Ss opened their compre- on it here. | ension rating instructions. For the Context After Ss, pmplicated. | enese instructions included the sentence, “It may help er facet of Í 04 to know that the paragraph was about washing E necessity | cores Approximately 2 minutes after the end of ONSASYer * acquisition, Ss were reminded to recall as accurately as possible and instructed to write down at least the essential ideas. Five minutes were allowed for recall. , Experiment: 1 procedure, The Ss were tested in First you | groups corresponding to the two conditions. Both urse, One groups heard the same tape recording of Passage B. ich thereis All instructions and the topic (again, “washing tolack of * clothes”) were given verbally by E. Acquisition are pretty | instructions informed Ss that they would later be asked 5. That is, | to recall all the essential ideas of the passage. There 00 many. | was a 1-minute interval between the end of acquisition rtant but and the comprehension rating and a I-minute interval beexpen- between the rating and recall tasks. Six minutes were 'eem com- allowed for recall. tt another y Experiment IV procedure. All Ss were tested simul- ind to the; taneously with a procedure símilar to that used in ture, but Experiment 11, The topic (which was presented on the je is com- acquisition instruction sheet and on the comprehension Int groups | rating instruction sheet for Topic Before and Topic Ipropriate ) After groups, respectively) was “making and flying a teand the | kite.” The sentences were read by E and there was a However, ml 2-second interval between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next. Six minutes were allowed for less like recall, PREREQUISITES FOR UNDERSTANDING 723 Subjects. in Experiment 11 the Ss were 52 male and female students enrolled in a course in human learning at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. The Ss for Experiments 11 (N= 21) and IV (N=30) Were male and female high schoo] student volunteers, Results Mean comprehension ratings and mean recal! scores for conditions in Experiments 11 and III are presented in Table 2 and those for Experiment IV are presented in Table 3. Experiment H. Comprehension ratings were higher in the Topic Before condition than ín either the No Topic or the Topic After condi- tions, Dunnett's test (3, 49) =4.46 and 4.80, p<.005, respectively. Likewise, recall was greater in the Topic Before condition than in the No Topic or Topic After conditions, (3, 49) = 3.97 and 4.20, p < .005, respectively. Experiment 1H. Both comprehension ratings and recall scores were higher in the Topic Before condition than in the Topic After condition: the Fs (1, 19) were 12.24 for com- prehension and 20.03 for recall, p<: .005 in both cases. * Standard error in parentheses. ints 1-0 :s, rather TABLE 2 tion, the MEAN COMPREHENSION RATINGS AND MEAN NUMBER OF ÍDEAS RECALLED shore is ler to rua Experiment II Experiment III 1 : — a pe E No Topic Topic Maximum Topic Topic Maximum (ed topic after before score after before score O — loving the Comprehension 2.29 (22)* 2,12 (.26) 4.50 (49) 7 3.40 (48) — 5.27(27) 7 beds lots Recall 2.82 (60) 2.65(.53) — 5.83(49) 18 3.30(.66) — 7.00(.43) 20 de very Y things * Standard error in parentheses. hsccond A TABLE 3 El simut» hs made MEAN COMPREHENSION RATINGS AND MEAN NUMBER OF ÍDEAS RECALLED, s Of the EXPERIMENT 1Y fesulting fashion. 4 No Topic Topic Maximum harefully topic after before score hat they po S Comprehension — 2.44(47)" 3.82 (.52) 4.00 (.59) 7 ore Ss Recalt 3.22 (.55) 3.18 (.57) 5.54 (76) 14 ph you pdiately «PP. + sg A e 724 Experiment IV. Tn the analysis of the com- prehension ratings, the Topic Before scores were higher than the No Topic scores, d(3, 28) =2.01, p<: .05. However, there was no significant difference between ratings of the Topic Before and Topic After Ss, p > .05, Recall of the Topic Before Ss was superior to that of both No Topic and of Topic After Ss, d(3, 28) = 2.49 and 2.68, p < .05, respec- tively. DISCUSSION The results of Experiments HL, 1H, and [Y indicate that prior knowledge of a situation does not guarantee its usefulness for compre- hension. In order for prior knowledge to aid comprehension, it must become an activated semantic context. As in Experiment IL, it appears that for maximum benefit the appro- priate information must be present during the ongoing process of comprehension. Compre- hension and recall scores of the Topic After groups were generally much lower than those of the Topic Before groups. In short, the effect of topic in Experiments TI, TIT, and TY was similar to that of context in Experiment T. Lachman and his associates (Pompi «e Lachman, 1967; Dooling $ Lachman, 1971) suggested that knowledge of the topic facili- tates retention by functioning as a mnemonic device. In recognition, Ss score higher on theme-related words because they match test words to the theme. In recall, a reconstructive process (with the theme as the mediating schema) is emphasized. The present writers view the role of the topic as something more than a schema for generating lexical matches or associations, however. Its critical role appears to be in helping Ss create contexts that can be used to comprehend the passages in the first place. At least in the present experiments, Topic After groups were at a considerable disadvantage relative to Topic Before groups. Most importantly, knowledge of the topic of a passage may be neither necessary nor sufficient for optimal compre- BRANSFORD AND JOHNSON hension. Note, for example, that the context situation 1 supplied in Experiment 1 did not contain generally t information about the topic of the stimulus | forunders passage. The topic would be something like they could “Possible breakdowns in communication '? extent to* during a serenade.” The picture simply | a problem supplied information about a basic situation ¡ stances. that could have been developed in many allow one different directions. The stimulus passage ;¡ are suffici: discussed just one of the many possible sets íngly in isc of events that could have taken place. The * additional picture greatly improved comprehension and ¿ by percep recall scores, despite the fact that Ss in the context, ir Context Before group had no more explicit The not. prior information about the topic than Ss in may be p: the other groups. Moreover, knowledge of the tion, or t topic alone is not sufficient for optical com- * perceptior prehension of the passage in Experiment L discussed Pilot studies indicate that Ss receiving the heim, 197 topic of this passage before hearing it were Gombrich still clearly inferior to Context Before Ss, The 1971). Alt topic “possible breakdowns in communication | to provid: during a serenade” is not sufficient to suggest these view the kind of contextual information communi- processes cated by the appropriate context picture. prehendin Tt is interesting that in all the experiments, results do the absence of an appropriate semantic tic contex context seemed to have an effect on memory of context that is similar to that found when Ss are led strategy f to focus on nonsemantic apects of linguistic 1 prior kno inputs. For example, attention to the ortho- / graphic properties of sentences or words 4 (rather tban attention to their semantic features) causes a considerable decrement in ARNHEJM, R recall (Bobrow $ Bower, 1969; Hyde Califor . A AUSUBEL, E Jenkins, 1969). In the present experiments all Mm view. N Ss presumably tried to process the inform- Tne., 15 ation semantically, yet attention to semantic : BaARTLETT, F properties alone will not guarantee the avail- ¡ Univer: ability of an adequate context for comprehen- | Bee. T. : sion of prose. P Pa Additional evidence that contexts are o Psycho, important for processing incoming inform- | BLumENTHa ation is that many of the Ss in the present of Vert experiments who were not provided with the 20320 A A z BLUMENTHA context or topic prior to hearing the passage sentenc reported that they actively searched for a Learnir 726 BRANSFORD AND JOHNSON TuLvia, E., £ OsLer, S. Effectiveness of retrieval cues in memory for words. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1968, 77, 593-601. "WANNER, H. E. On remembering, forgettingand under- standing sentences: a study of the deep structure hypothesis, Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Harvard University, 1968. WINOGRAD, T. Procedures as a representation for date in a computer program for understanding naturab language. Report No. MAC TR-84, Massachu- setts Institute of Technology, Project MAC, 1971. (Reccived March 13, 1972) y JOURNAL OF VERBAL LEA Information Two lineas paragraph by he paragrap Ú Responses tc than respons: remote pairs + result is incor : some subset » chaining the: | The classical e | memory consists € t slightly faded copi linked together by : % disfavor among 1 chologists. Cogniti' more receptive to E memories are the r- tive process whick input information, version of this im y, resemblance to the presented. Accord information js ir organized settings asked a question al subjects must use reconstruct the Barilet''s words, * This paper is base the Department of Ps5 partial fulfillment of t degree. The research «+ was beingsupported b and was supported in Dr. Frank Restle. lao the continued suppor project. 2 Nowat the Depar Coilege, Hanover, N Copycight (9 1972 by Ace All nghls of reproduction