LEARNING ABOUT ADDED SENTENCE FRAGMENTS FOLLOWING REPEATED INSPECTION OF WRITTEN DISCOURSE

Determined the noticeability of sentence fragments by a detection procedure. In Exp. II these fragments were presented to 181 college Ss exactly once, embedded in a written passage that had been exposed n times before (n = 0, 1, 2, or 3). Learning about these fragments decreased as a function of n for fragments of low measured noticeability, but increased markedly for those which were highly noticeable. Performance on the old material appears to be a limiting condition for how much can be learned about newly added material during any 1 exposure. Results are consistent with the interpretation that inspection behaviors critical for learning were partially controlled by text characteristics but that these behaviors were changed in important ways during repeated massed exposures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved). © 1968 American Psychological Association.