Good and bad structure in simple paragraphs: Effects on apparent theme, reading time, and recal

The results suggest that unintegrable input must be held in immediate memory pending integration, leading to a greater processing load.

Abstract

Conventional paragraph structure requires that the topic sentence be presented first, followed by connected, coherent sentences. The processing role of these rules was investigated by comparing performance on reading simple passages that conformed to or violated conventional paragraph organization. In three experiments, subjects read such passages, presented one sentence at a time; data collected were a choice of “best title,” which provided a measure of apparent theme, the reading time on each sentence, and gist recall scores. The results were that bad paragraph structure produced (a) fewer choices of the topical proposition as the best title; (b) longer reading times, mainly on the initial incoherent sentences, which can not be immediately integrated; and (c) lower recall of passage content, especially of the initially unintegrable sentences. These results suggest that unintegrable input must be held in immediate memory pending integration, leading to a greater processing load. The role of the paragraph structure conventions is thus to minimize memory load.