Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Traditional theories of text memory and comprehension posit that text is represented and reconstructed based upon its semantic content. In contrast, Rubin (1995) found that poetic materials are remembered based not only on semantic content, but based also on the schematic constraints, such as rhythm and rhyme, present in the surface structure of the verse. Rubin's research has done much to record the phenomenon of memory for poetic, structured materials. The present study is an investigation of the effects of multiple schematic constraints on participants' recall for words in limericks. This study provides support for Rubin's claims that surface structure and schematic constraints facilitate recall for schema-consistent poetic materials. In addition, the present study extends the analysis of the effects of schematic constraints, illustrating that the schematic constraints present in structured verse serve to guide recall for schema-inconsistent material, making the inconsistent material schema-consistent upon recall.