A STUDY OF SPACING EFFECT IN FREE-RECALL OF SENTENCES - ON FULL PROCESSING HYPOTHESIS

Full processing hypothesis of the spacing effect attributes poor recall of massed-repeated items to a failure to process the repeated items fully. Present study examined the applicability of this hypothesis to sentence free recall task in two experiments. The spacing effect was tested by presenting each sentence with or without intervening ones. The rehearsal procedure was used to enhance the full processing of massed-repeated items. In both Experiments I and II spaced presentation yielded substantially higher level of recall than did massed presentation. However, when the full processing was enhanced by rehearsal procedure in Experiment II, massed presentation yielded the same level of recall as spaced couterparts. These results suggest that the failure of full processing in massed presentation results in the spacing effect of the sentence free recall task.