Role of single word variables in recall of statistical approximations to English

Free recall of lists at different orders of approximation to English was compared to the recall of the same lists when the order of the words had been scrambled to destroy their sequential organization. Recall of the organized lists showed the typical improvement with increasing order of approximation. Recall of the scrambled lists was unrelated to the original order of approximation. The results indicate that increased recall with increasing order of approximation to English is not produced by systematic differences in the characteristics of the individual words comprising the approximations. When recall of the organized lists was scored in terms of the number of longer sequences present in recall, the number of recalled sequences of any given length increased as order of approximation to English increased, with the first order list showing proportionally less organization in recall than the second and higher order lists.