Semantic organization and retrieval of information from sentences

Seventy-two subjects attempted to recall the object nouns of seven once-exposed sentences given as retrieval cues the subject noun of each sentence and four other words related to the subject noun. The related cues were a remote superordinate, a close superordinate, a remote cohyponym, and a close cohyponym of the subject noun. Four predictions about differences in effectiveness of these cues, derived from the Katz and Fodor and the Quillian theories of semantics, were confirmed. There was one case about which the theories made different predictions. Consistent with Quillian's theory, but contrary to the Katz and Fodor theory, significantly more words were recalled when the cue was a close rather than a remote superordinate.