INTEGRATION OF KNOWLEDGE FROM TEXT

Three experiments investigated factors influencing the integration of facts acquired from texts. Experiment 1 investigated integration of two constituent facts into a single higher-order knowledge structure. Integration was measured by (a) the ability to detect that case fillers from separately acquired facts were part of a single case frame and (b) the ability to retrieve case fillers from separate facts given only the common case frame for the two facts. Integration was facilitated by proximity of related facts and by identical, rather than paraphrased, wordings of the common case frames in related facts. Experiment 2 replicated the basic findings of Experiment 1 in a recognition paradigm and demonstrated that integrated memory representations preserve the identities of the original constituent facts. In Experiment 3, integration was measured as the ability to verify inferences deducible from separately acquired facts. This kind of integration also benefitted from identical, rather than paraphrased, wordings of the common information in related facts. In addition, Experiment 3 showed that the observed effects persisted after a 30-minute retention interval. © 1979 Academic Press, Inc.