Zervakis, J., & Rubin, D. C. (1998). Memory and learning for a novel written style. Memory & Cognition, 26(4), 754-767.

Zervakis, J.; Rubin, D.

1998

Zervakis, J., & Rubin, D. C. (1998). Memory and learning for a novel written style. Memory & Cognition, 26(4), 754-767.

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In Exp 1, 21 Ss read and recalled a series of 5 short stories in 1 of 4 plot and style combinations. The stories were written in 1 of 2 styles that consisted of opposing clause orders, tense forms, and descriptor forms. The Ss were able to learn the regularities of both the style and the plot over successive recalls. This is the first demonstration of style learning using an arbitrary novel style. In Exp 2, 48 Ss who, after 5 recalls, either generated a new story or listed the rules that had been followed by the stories read, included the marked forms of the characteristics they learned more often, except for tense. In Exp 3, 75 Ss read and recalled 4 stories of the same plot and style and then read and recalled a fifth story of the same plot and style or of one of the other 3 plot/style combinations. Ability to switch style was found to depend on both the characteristic and the markedness.

Experiment 2 demonstrated that subjects, when asked to generate a new story of the same type, incorporated a higher percentage of the nore unusual or marked style type in the generated story. For clause order, this was the dependent-independent clause order, for descriptors, the phrase descriptor. Tense was an expetion: the subjects reverted to past tense in the generated story.

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