Summarizing Stories After Reading and Listening

Journal of Educational Psychology 1977, Vol. 69, No. 5, 491-499

Summarizing Stories After Reading and Listening Walter Kintsch and Ely Kozminsky University of Colorado

Subjects either listened to or read three tape-recorded stories, each about 2,000 words in length. Immediately after processing each story, the subjects wrote a summary in 60-80 words. A comparison of the summaries written after reading with those written after listening revealed only minor differences. Subjects tended to include a little more idiosyncratic detail in their summaries after listening than after reading, but the shared content of the summaries remained remarkably unchanged. These results helped to identify the common core of comprehension processes that underlie both listening and skilled reading.

Research on reading processes has been hampered by our inability to determine exactly which aspects of a task are specifically related to reading and which are a function of comprehension processes in general. A comparison of performance after reading and after listening^ enables us to locate those components of performance that are reading specific. We assume that listening is a highly overlearried process and that performance on comprehension tasks after listening to a text provide s _ _ processes themselves. The assumption appears reasonable, at least within certain boundary conditions, that the act of listening does not impose noticeable limits on the comprehension process. Thus, performance differences that are observed in subjects who read a text versus those who listen to it can be attributed to constraints placed upon the comprehension process by the act of reading. It may be the case that many of the socalled reading problems of poor readers are in fact comprehension problems (e.g., Sticht, in press). Since procedures to overcome these problems depend crucially upon whether they are in fact reading problems or more general comprehension This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant 15872 to the first author. Requests for reprints should be sent to Walter Kintsch, Department of Psychology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309.

problems, we need to know for any given cognitive task to be performed on a text which aspects of that task are affected by the act of reading. For fluent adult readers^ performance is remarkably similar after both reading and time is egual to the listening time. Under some circumstances small advantages for reading have been reported (e.g., King & Maddil, 1968; Sanders, 1973), but in general reading and listening give comparable results. At least this is the case when subjects read or listen to short texts and then answer factual questions about the text (e.g., Sticht, 1972) or attempt to recall it (King, 1968; Kintsch, Kozminsky, Streby, McKoon, & Keenan, 1975). The present experiment extended these results to a more complex task: Subjects were presented stories 4-5 pages in length and were then asked to summarize them. It is possible that differences between reading and listening that did not reveal themselves with simpler tasks might emerge with this task. When subjects listen to a story, they must rely completely upon their memory. When they read it, they can go back to the text and check points about which they are uncertain. In order to maximize this contrast between reading and listening, such checking of the text was permitted even while subjects wrote their summaries. The way in which people summarize texts, especially stories, has recently been the subject of both experimental and theo-

491

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WALTER KINTSCH AND ELY KOZMINSKY

Method retical investigations (e.g., Kintsch, 1976; Rumelhart, 1975; van Dijk & Kintsch, in press). Theoretically, van Dijk and Subjects Kintsch (in press) have regarded summarTwo groups of 24 subjects each served in the readies as expressions of the macrostructure of ing and listening conditions of the experiment, retexts. For stories, the macrostructure is spectively. Subjects were college students at the formed on the basis of the story schema, University of Colorado who participated for pay in sessions, working on two stories in the first which is a set of expectations about the two session and on a third story (and an unrelated task) conventions observed within a culture in in the second session. All subjects were able to type. writing stories. For example, the prototypical story in our culture consists of one or Materials more episodes, each in an exposition-comThree stories from a modern (1972) translation of plication-resolution format. Thus, all the Decameron were used: Story 1-Second material within a story can be assigned to Boccaccio's Day (which will be identified here as the saint one of the three narrative categories. In story), Story 4-Second Day (merchant), and Story 6addition, the schema requires that the Ninth Day (lovers). The lengths of these stories events of a story be temporally and were approximately 2,020, 1,950, and 2,080 words, causally connected, and imposes a number respectively. The stories were used without modifiof other constraints (for a full discussion, cation. see van Dijk & Kintsch, in press; Rumelhart, 1975, presents a different but related Design approach). Summaries are therefore of Each subject wrote a summary immediately after particular interest because they reveal reading each story. The order of presentation of the more directly the organizational processes three stories was counterbalanced over subjects, in text comprehension, which tend to be with 8 subjects reading each story in the first, secand third position. This design was then replisomewhat obscured in recall. For instance, ond, cated with another group of 24 subjects with audiwhen recalling brief paragraphs, subjects tory presentation of the stories. for the most part merely reproduce the input (though not necessarily verbatim). When they recall a long text, such as one Procedure of the stories used here, a great deal of In the reading condition, subjects were given a detail is reconstructed, submerging the typewritten copy of each story to read at their own main points of the story. On the other pace. When they had read a story, they were asked write a summary of it. The complete instructions hand, summaries tend to concentrate on to were as follows: the main points of stories, without the deWe want you to read this story and then write a tail typical of recall protocols. Thus, in summary of it. Please read the whole story terms of the psychological processes inthrough at first, and then go back and write the volved, recall of short paragraphs, recall of summary. You can go back to the story whenever long texts, and summarization of long you like. textsjare_all Quite different. The first tells The summary should reproduce the most imporus primarily about reproductive processes, tant events in the story. It must be between 60 and the second about reconstructive processes, 80 words long. Type the summary on this screen, and the computer will automatically count the and the third about qr^anizationa.Lprocr number of words whenever you like, so that you esses. will find it easy to stay within the 60-80 word The stories used as experimental matelimit. You can revise and edit your summary as rials in the present experiment came from much as you like, but the final product must be a coherent English text. Boccaccio's Decameron. These stories had the advantage of being interesting and en- The reason for restricting the length of the summary tertaining, which was of considerable im- was that preexperiments had shown that, without portance in gaining the subjects' coopera- such a restriction, summaries differed in length so tion in the rather demanding task that widely as to make a comparison between them probthey were asked to perform. These stories lematic. The subjects wrote their summaries on a comwere also very simple structurally, and puter-controlled typewriter, with the text appearing hence easily summarized. on a screen before them. They were taught to use the

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SUMMARIZING STORIES computer to edit their summaries so that they could erase and add to them at will. The computer displayed the number of words written, thus sparing them the laborious task of repeatedly counting the number of words they had written. Subjects worked on their summaries at their own pace until they were satisfied and the number of words fell within the required range. After finishing (and a rest pause), they were handed the next story to read and summarize. No record was kept of the changes subjects made in writing their summaries. The experiment was performed in the CLIPR laboratory of the University of Colorado. The procedure was the same in all important respects in the listening condition, except that subjects listened to a tape recording of each story. The tapes were prepared by a male, native speaker with some recording experience and were spoken at a comfortable, natural rate.

Data Analysis In addition to recording the time it took subjects to write their summaries and counting the number of words in them, the summaries were scored for their propositional content. The theory developed by Kintsch (1974) was employed for that purpose. Thus, each summary obtained in the experiment was analyzed into a string of underlying propositions representing the meaning of that protocol. In practice this procedure is similar to scoring "idea units," except that it is more objective because the nature of the idea units is specified. (For detailed descriptions of this procedure, see Kintsch, 1974, or Kintsch et al., 1975.) It should be noted that the results obtained by means of this analysis are to some extent independent of it, and equivalent results would be obtained for other systems of analysis using caselike frames. For instance, suppose we find that summaries in Condition A contain an average of 15 propositions and in Condition B they contain 20 propositions. Although these numbers would change if a different kind of propositional analysis were used (e.g., that of Norman & Rumelhart, 1975, in which complex semantic concepts are not always treated as units but decomposed into their elements), the conclusion that more propositions are used when summaries are written under Condition B than under Condition A would probably remain unchanged. Thus, while not theory-free, the analysis is at least theory-robust. We are not concerned with how many propositions in a summary protocol are correct in the sense that they reproduce input propositions. Most statements in a summary are not reproductive, but nevertheless correct, in that they are generalizations and inferences from the text. Errors, in the sense of wrong statements are exceedingly rare. Thus, we are interested in two things: hnw much people say in their summaries and _ho\v_goadJheir summaries are. A theory-free index of the quality of summaries is obtained by looking at the amount of agreement that exists between subjects. A good summary is one in which everyone agrees; when

everyone summarizes a text differently, this indicates that subjects really do not know what to do. A second index of the quality of a summary, which is, however, theory dependent, is also used. We shall look at how complete summaries are. More specifically, the theory requires that a summary contain statements for each episode in the story in each of the three story categories (exposition, complication, resolution). When a summary writer omits one of these categories, this is again a sign that he is having trouble with the story. More detailed theoretical analyses would be possible, but the main points of this article can be established without them.

Results The data were analyzed by means of an analysis of variance with presentation mode (reading vs. listening) as a betweensubjects factor and stories as a within-subjects random factor. Separate analyses were performed for practice effects and serial position effects. Differences Between Stories Although stories were chosen that were similar in length and structure, there was no reason to suppose that interstory differences would be absent, in spite of these similarities. In fact, however, the results did not differ greatly between stories, as Table 1 shows. The differences in writing times were not statistically_significant because of the large amount of variability in the data. Subjects used most of the words allowed to them in writing their summaries, with only small and nonsignificant _differences between stories. The differences Table 1 Writing Times (in min.), Number of Words, and Number of Propositions per Summary for the Three Stories Story Lovers

Merchant

Saint

26.97 1.76

21.68 1.76

21.55 1.75

77.22

.64

75.48 .82

76.17 .79

17.94 .43

18.33 .34

19.45 .52

Writing time

M SE No. of words

M SE No. of propositions

M SE Note. N = 48.

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WALTER KINTSCH AND ELY KOZMINSKY

in the number^fjpropositions used in the summaries were equally small, but were statistically significant, F (2, 92) = 5.13, p < .01. However, this factor did not interact with the other experimental variables.

Table 3 Writing Times (in min.), Number of Words, Number of Propositions, and Number of Idiosyncratic Propositions for the Reading and Listening Conditions Condition Factor

Practice Effects The data for the first, second, and third summary written by each subject are shown in Table 2. Except for writing times, these order effects were small. When writing their first summary, subjects were still learning how to use the computer-controlled typewriter and were adjusting themselves to the task demands (i.e., summarization). They needed much more time to write their first_summary than the second or third. In all other respects, however, performance differences as a function of practice were minor and not statistically significant.

Reading

Listening

26.43 1.62

20.26 1.32

74.83 .67

77.76 .51

17.64 .46

19.53 .49

4.89 .48

6.19 .31

Writing time M

SE No. of words M

SE No. of propositions

M SE No. of idiosyncratic propositions M SE Note. N = 72.

subjects in checking their summaries against the story, which was possible only in the reading condition. Reading Versus Listening More propositions were_CQntained_ in .the protocols in the listening condition (19.5) Since neither story nor order effects than in the reading condition (17.7). This were large and since they did not interact difference was significant, F'(l, 7) = 6.86, with the main variable of experimental p < .05. interest, these effects can be disregarded The suggestion that subjects say more in in the reading-listening comparison which their summaries when they listen to a is shown in Table 3. In both conditions story than when they read it is further subjects used up most of the words allowed investigated in the last row of Table 3. The them in writing their summaries. How- total number of propositions in each sumever, subjects who had read the stories mary can be partitioned into two types: worked longer at their summaries than propositions that appeared in other protosubjects who had listened. This difference cols of the same conditions and proposiprobably reflects the extra time spent by tions_that_gccurred only once. The latter were idiosyncratic statements — in other Table 2 words, relatively unimportant material. Writing Times (in min.), Number of Words, Apparently much of the difference in the and Number of Propositions per Summary as a total number of propositions between the Function of Order of Presentation reading and listening subjects can be Presentation order traced to the somewhat greater readiness Factor of the latter subjects to add unique, joften First Second Third quite irrelevant, statements to their sumWriting time maries. M 32.12 18.80 19.15 1.64 SB 1.77 1.28 If one looks not at the number of proposiNo. of words tions in a summary, but at the ajnouiiLQf. M 77.13 75.33 76.40 intersubject agreement for each proposiSE .64 .81 tion, the data in Table 4 are obtained. No. of propositions M 19.02 18.21 18.48 Specifically, we made a list of all proposiSE .43 .43 .46 tions used in the protocols, and for each Note. N = 48. proposition the number of subjects who

SUMMARIZING STORIES

Table 4 Distribution of the Number of Subjects Producing a Given Summary Proposition

Condition

Story

Read

Listen

2.8 3.7

2.5 3.7

2.9 4.4

2.3 4.1

3.0 4.1

2.6 4.0

Lovers M SD

Merchant M SD Saint M SD

495

138) = 49.27, p < .001. As in the main analysis, the reading and listening conditions also differed significantly, F(l, 46) = 7.70, p < .01, and the two factors interacted significantly, F(3, 138) = 5.76, p < .01. As already mentioned, there were raorejjrorjpjsitiojM jn the listening condition than in the reading condition. Specifically, subjectsjwho Jistened_tQ_.the. stories produced more Idiosyncratic propositions, and these tended to be concentrated in the lasj^jjuartile. The Popular Summary

If one takesjthe propositions most freused it was listed. Some propositions were used by all subjects, while others (the idio- quently used by subjects in their summarsyncratic propositions discussed above) ies and puts them into the right order, one were mentioned by only a single subject. can construct a "popular" summary for The means and standard deviations of eachjstor^. Thus, the 14 most frequently these distributions are presented in Table used propositions from the summaries of 4. These means are slightly smaller in the the merchant story were selected from the listening condition than in the reading propositions produced by the reading subcondition (in agreement with the earlier jects as well as the listening subjects. observation that a great number of unique There were 24 subjects in each condition, propositions were found in that condition), and the most frequent proposition in each but none_jof_the_three_ differences reached set was used by 22 of them (92%), while the acceptable levels ofstatistical significance, 14th most frequent proposition was still with t values of 1.56, 1.23, and 1.01, respec- used by about 50% of the subjects in each tively, all for more than 300 degrees of freedom. Correlating the number of times T" a given proposition^, appeared in the summaries written after reading and_after lis- to tening produced correlation coefficients of 0 4 0 — r = .64, .88, and .86 for lovers, merchant and saint, respectively, all of which are en o highly significant. CL Serial Position Effects

O (T

30 I—

CL

Each story was divided into four parts so < 20 that the number of words in each part was H approximately the same. Then the number O of propositions that subjects wrote in their U- 10 summaries was determined for each story O quarter. The overall results are shown in Figure 1. Subjects used almost twice, as _JL I i L much material from the first quarter of the i n m isc story as from the third. In an analysis with STORY QUARTILES the factors condition and quartiles, aver1. The distribution of material used in the aging over stories because too few data Figure summaries for the four quartiles of the story. (Averpoints were otherwise available, the serial age data for all subjects and all stories are preposition effect was highly significant, sented.)

L

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WALTER KINTSCH AND ELY KOZMINSKY

condition. Of the 14 top-ranked propositions in each condition, 13 were the same in both conditions. These results are shown in Table 5, which also shows the frequency with which each proposition was chosen in the reading and listening condition. Proposition 3 was among the top-ranked set in the reading condition, but not in the listening condition, and Proposition 11 was conversely used more frequently by the listening subjects than by the reading subjects. The choice of 14 propositions for the popular summary was an arbitrary one: It was the smallest set that produced a good summary of about the right length. In generating this summary, the propositions were arranged in their proper order and sentence connectives were added. There are two important points to note about Table 5: First, the 13 propositions common to both experimental conditions make a fine summary of the story; even if one does not know the story, they are obviously coher-

Table 6 Percentage of Responses in Different Narrative Categories Narrative category

Merchant

Story Lovers

Saint

35 31

40 37

46 41

29 28

38 46

39 43

36 41

22 16

15 16

Exposition Reading Listening Complication Reading Listening Resolution Reading Listening

ent and make sense. Second, the agreement between the reading and listening conditions is quite remarkable. Subjects are consistent in what they write in a summary, and it matters very little, whether they had read the story or listened to it. Equally good summaries can be obtained in the same way for the other two stories. Narrative Categories

Table 5 Popular Summary for the Merchant Story Proposition 1. Rufolo was a merchant. 2. He was rich 3. and wanted to double his fortune. 4. (But) he was ruined. 5. He became a pirate, 6. (thus) regaining his fortune. 7. (Finally,) he was captured by the Geonesc 8. (and then) shipwrecked 9. Rufolo clung to a chest 10. (and) was rescued by a woman 11. who nursed him back to health. 12. He found some jewels 13. in the chest, 14. and returned home 15. as a rich man.

—

Condition Reading Listening 12 12

13 11

14 13 22

19 20

14

11

16 18 13

22 19

14

13

9b 12 16 18 15

13 15 21 15 16

8"

13

" This statement was not among the top 14 in the listening condition. " This statement was not among the top 14 in the reading condition.

A theoretical analysis of the structure of the merchant story has been given in Kintsch (1976). According to that analysis, the story consists of a single episode, with an exposition which is summarized by Statements 1-5 in Table 5, a complication corresponding to Statements 6-9, and a resolution comprising Statements 10-15. The other two stories can be analyzed similarly. If one computes the number of responses in each narrative category for the three stories (separately for the reading and listening condition), the data in Table 6 are obtained. It should be noted that there were important differences between stories with respect to the importance of the various^ categoriesjn the summaries. For instance, the proportion of statements in the resolution category was more than twice as high in the merchant story than it was in saint. This, however, reflects primarily the way the stories were written. More important is the obvious lack of systematic differences in the proportion of statements in the various narrative categories as a function of mode of presenta-

SUMMARIZING STORIES

tion. Chi-square tests jrf^ the^_di_fferences between jreading and listening yielded values of 1.31", 3.33, and .82 for merchant, lovers, and saint, respectively, all for 2 degrees of freedom. None_ of the_se_were statistic.aUy_significant. Thus, the structure of the ^summaries that subjects write after reading or listen ingtoa.story_isjB8sentiaUy the same. The same statements are salient after reading and listening (as indicated by their frequency of usage), and the different structural parts of the story are emphasized in the same way. In both cases the summaries are quite good ones; Table 5, for instance, is almost identical to the theoretical summary for the merchant story in Kintsch (1976). Table 5 is, of course, not the summary written by an individual subject, but a composite that shows what subjects agree upon when writing a summary. Individual summaries tend to contain many of the statements in Table 5, plus a sprinkling of idiosyncratic responses. Thus, they may contain statements that we consider superfluous in a summary, but almost never do they contain a wrong statement. A measure of how adequate an individual summary is can be obtained by checking whether it contains at least one statement in each narrative category that corresponds to a theoretical summary statement. By this rather loose criterion, expositions are represented in 99% of all protocols, complications in 98%, and resolutions in 76%, with no readinglistening differences. In other words, .subjects practically always mention at least something^.about exposiiions_ and .complications but often delete resolutions from their summaries. Discussion Reading and listening differences in this experiment are surprisingly small: There may be a tendency to say a little more when listening than when reading, but this effect is a small one at best, and the overall pattern of results is very similar in the two conditions. This lack of difference is surprising when one considers that subjects who read the story had free access to

497

it while writing their summaries, while the subjects who listened to the story had to work entirely from memory. It is, however, in good agreement with other studies that have shown th_at_moda_l_ity differences matter remarkably little for college-studenj;_s_ubjects, at least for the tasks so far explored (e.g., Kintsch et al., 1975; Sticht, 1972). While the present data thus complement previous results on reading-listening differences, they extend these in a number of ways. First of all, they add another task (summarization) to the previously used ones (recall, question answering). Summarization involves quite different psychological processes than recall (e.g., van Dijk & Kintsch, in press), and is sensitive to organizational, sjructujt^j_yj^iabjes (such as the availability of a schema). Since no significant reading-listening differences were foun37one can argue that these processes,_too,_are general components of comprehensipji^jnitner than reading specific. Second, the emphasis in the present study was upon qualitative rather than quantitative analyses. The lack of pronounced reading-listening differences in the number of words or in the number of propositions used in the summaries is less important than the nature of these propositions: Subjects agreed quite well on what to include in their summaries whether they read or listened to the stories. The same items were salient in either case, and the structural elements of the stories were reproduced equally well. Taken together, the analyses based upon Tables 46 strongly argue that the summaries written_afte_r reading^andJistening are equally good_o^_both ^..qualitative_and_R quantitative basis. Needless to say, these conclusions are restricted by the nature of the present experiment, in particular, by the college-student subjects and the relatively easy texts employed. Of course, there may be boundary conditions beyond which reading and listening no longer produce comparable results. The nature of these boundary conditions is as yet poorly understood, however. Certainly, differences will arise for poor readers (e.g., Sticht, 1972) and perhaps

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WALTER KINTSCH AND ELY KOZMINSKY

also as a function of the complexity of the tasks that subjects are asked to perform (e.g., King & Maddil, 1968), although summarizing a story appears to be a fairly complex task and only rather trivial reading-listening differences were observed here. One might also expect differences in favor of reading for very difficult texts, for which a well-established schema is not available or the content is unfamiliar. One obvious difference between reading and listening which would be highlighted by more difficult texts is the fact that reading rate is usually subject controlled whereas listening rate is not. On the other hand, because of the nature of short-term memory, listening may have an advantage on an immediate test (Sachs, 1974). The absence of a pronounced readinglistening difference in the present experiment lends some support to J;he theoretical position taken in the introduction to this article: Reading and listening involve identicaljcomprehen_sipn skills. These skills develop first in oral language and are later transferred to reading. This is the position taken by Sticht (in press). Others have emphasized instead the differences between reading and listening. Mattingly (1972), for instance, held that reading and listening are not "directly analogous." Whether they are or not, is, of course, an empirical question; so far we have found them to be quite analogous. The data reported in the present study also have some methodological implications for the study of how people summarize texts (e.g., Kintsch, 1976; van Dijk & Kintsch, in press). In particular, it has been shown that summarizing stories is a feasible laboratory task. Subjects agree reasonably well about what they write in their summaries. The summaries may be scored in terms of their propositional content, and the propositions used most frequently may form the basis for a popular abstract, thus providing a means of empirically evaluating theories that attempt to account for the process of summarizing. Modality effects as well as practice effects are small, at least under the present experimental conditions, and need not constrain the design of future experiments to

any serious extent. Note, however, the importance of restricting the length of the summary to a fairly brief range. Completely free summaries are much less useful, because the instruction to summarize is too vague. A summary may be as short as a title or as long as a complete recall protocol, and we need to tell the subject what is expected from him; otherwise, different subjects will interpret these instructions differently, and the resulting protocols will be incomparable. An interesting, unexpected feature of the summaries obtained here was the imbalance between the various parts of the story. Subjects devoted a considerably larger portion of their summaries to the first quarter of each story than to any of the remaining quarters. This result is probably not an artifact of restricting the summaries to 80 words, since slightly more summary propositions concerning the very end of the story were given than concerning the quarter before that. Thus, it does not look as if subjects simply ran out of space. Instead, this result appears to reflect a bias in favor of the setting of the story, which subjects seem to regard as very important in a summary, while other parts, especially the outcome of the story, are often mentioned only briefly. References Boccaccio, G. The decameron (G. H. McWilliam, trans.). London: Penguin Books, 1972. King, D. J. Retention of connected meaningful material as a function of modes of presentation and recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1968, 77, 676-683. King, D. J., & Maddil, J. Complex methods of presentation, internal consistency of learning material, and accuracy of written recall. Psychological Reports, 1968,22, 777-782. Kintsch, W. The representation of meaning in memory. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1974. Kintsch, W. Memory for prose. In C. N. Gofer (Ed.), The structure of human memory. San Francisco: Freeman, 1976. Kintsch, W., Kozminsky, E., Streby, W. J., McKoon, G., & Keenan, J. M. Comprehension and recall of text as a function of content variables. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1975,74, 196-214. Mattingly, I. Reading, the linguistic process, and linguistic awareness. In J. Kavanagh & I. Mattingly (Eds.), Language by ear and by eye. Cam-

SUMMARIZING STORIES bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972. Norman, D. A., & Rumelhart, D. E. Explorations in cognition. San Francisco: Freeman, 1975. Rumelhart, D. E. Notes on a schema for stories. In D. G. Bobrow & A. Collins (Eds.), Representation and understanding. New York: Academic Press, 1975. Sachs, J. S. Memory in reading and listening to discourse. Memory & Cognition, 1974,2, 95-100. Sanders, J. R. Adjunct questions and written and aural recall. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1973, 65, 181-186. Sticht, T. G. Learning by listening. In J. B. Carroll

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& R. O. Freedle (Eds.), Language comprehension and the acquisition of knowledge. Washington, D.C.: V. H. Winston, 1972. Sticht, T. G. Application of the audread model to reading evaluation and instruction. In L. Resnik & P. Weaver (Eds.), Theory and practice of early reading. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, in press. van Dijk, T. A., & Kintsch, W. Cognitive psychology and discourse: Recalling and summarizing stories. In W. U. Dressier (Ed.), Trends in text linguistics. New York and Berlin: de Gruyter, in press.

Received December 14, 1976 •