Recognition memory for deducible information.

Recent research in language comprehension indicates a constructive encoding process in which the linguistic input is transformed into some more general semantic structure which is stored. In attempting to characterize the nature of such structures, some conflicting findings have been observed for paragraphs which describe similar set-theoretic relations, linear orderings and set inclusions. While the linear ordering research supports the constructivist theory, the set inclusion work does not. The set inclusion studies, however, employed true-false tests and not the usual recognition tests. The present study investigated the processing of set inclusion paragraphs in a self-paced study/recognition test paradigm. Results supported the constructivist theory and were contrary to predictions based upon the previous set inclusion research. Subjects were unable to differentiate between presented information and unpresented deducible information. These results were discussed in terms of accuracy constraints of different tasks on memorial performance and a possible interaction of Type of Test by Universal Quantification.