WHAT MAKES FOLK TALES UNIQUE - CONTENT FAMILIARITY, CAUSAL-STRUCTURE,SCRIPTS, OR SUPERSTRUCTURES

Requiring readers to reorder randomly Ordered sentences into a coheren t text significantly enhances recall relative to that in a read-only c ontrol condition for non-folk-tale texts but not for folk tales (Einst ein, McDaniel, Owen, & Cote, 1990). Experiments 1-3 showed that embedd ing components of folk tales (e.g., causal structure, conventional scr ipts, content related to background knowledge) in non-folk-tale texts did not render sentence unscrambling ineffective for increasing recall . In Experiments 4a-4c, a folk tale was presented either as a fairy ta le or as part of a newspaper article. Significant sentence unscramblin g effects (in free recall) were not obtained in either presentation fo rmat, which implies that a story superstructure (a story grammar) does not contribute to the absence of the sentence unscrambling effect. It is suggested that understanding why the sentence unscrambling effect is absent for folk tales may require considering the functional role t hat narrative plays in socioculturally situated cognition.