Initial mention as a signal to thematic content in technical passages

Abstract

Information near the beginning of a passage has often been reported to be recalled better than information appearing later in the passage. The explanation has been that the most important information in a passage is recalled best, and this information usually appears early in a passage. This suggests that there is a linguistic convention that important information should appear in an initial position. That initial mention functions as a signal to the important, or thematic, content of a passage was demonstrated with two experiments in which readers reported what they thought was the main idea or the main item of technical passages. The first experiment unconfounded content and position by using passages in which the main idea was expressed by a sentence that appeared either first in the passage or embedded in the middle of the passage. Statements of the main idea resembled the intended theme sentence to a greater extent if this sentence appeared first than if it was embedded. The second experiment showed that statements of the main item tended to name the major referent that appeared first in the passage. The results suggest that readers base much of their abstractive processes on the semantic content of a passage, with superficial features such as initial mention serving to guide or influence these processes. © 1980 Psychonomic Society, Inc.