COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY 2, 309-312 (1971) Memory for Prenominal Adjectives in Ordinary English Sentences1 GARY M. OLSON~ Stanford University Ss have been found to remember the gist of English sentences quite well while having little or no memory for structural features unrelated to the basic meaning. This research examines the representation of meaning in memory using adjective-noun phrases embedded in ordinary sentences. Ss studied a long series of sentences and were later tested for memory of certain of the adjectives in these sentences. Tested with a specially constructed forced- choice recognition procedure, Ss made significantly more recognition errors to distracters from the same predicative class as the correct choice than they did to d&tractors from different classes. This effect was highly significant when the correct choice was a nonpolar adjective but was not different from chance when a polar was correct. Data from a recall test procedure sug- gested this difference was due to Ss remembering the denotative or ref- erential meaning of the adjective. The results showed that Ss remember abstract aspects of the predicative meaning of adjectival modification, The long-term mnemonic representation of ordinary English sentences appears to be essentially semantic. Laboratory research (e.g., Foa & Schlesinger, 1965; Fillenbaum, 1966; Sachs, 1967; Wanner, 1968; Begg & Paivio, 1969) as well as our own day-to-day experience with language shows that we can remember the gist of connected discourse exceed- ingly well but are very poor at remembering structural aspects of the material that are unrelated to the meaning. Little is known, however, about the details of what is stored in memory when the meaning of a sentence is comprehended and remembered. Several hypotheses about what is remembered have been proposed ‘The research reported here was carried out while the author held a Danforth Graduate Fellowship, and it formed the basis for a thesis submitted in partial fulfill- ment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree at Stanford University (Olson, 1970). The author thanks Gordon H. Bower, Herbert H. Clark, George A. Kaplan, and Roger N. Shepard, the members of his dissertation committee, for their advice and encouragement, and Michael R. Fehling for his constant stimulation. ” The author’s current address: Submarine Medical Research Laboratory, Naval Submarine Medical Center ( Rou 600), Nav;tl Sulmrarint~ Baste Nr\v I,ontlon, Proton, Connrcticlrt 06340. 300