Abstract:

According to fuzzy-trace theory both gist and verbatim memories are based on inputs, but they are stored separately (Reyna, & Kiernan, 1992). It follows, than, that memory for gist can be accessed without accessing verbatim memory and vice versa. We investigated whether properly instructed children can distinguish gist and verbatim memory in a recognition task for sentences. Some sentences belong to the text and others are inferences congruent with the text.

Keywords: memory, text comprehension, inferences generation