Abstract
Forty-eight college students listened to two ambiguous passages about familiar topics under one of four context conditions. Half of the students were given appropriate contextual information about the passages either just before or just after hearing the passages. The remaining students either received no contextual information or received inappropriate contextual information about the passages. Following an interpolated activity, recall of the passage information was significantly lower for those subjects who were not able to activate an appropriate schema at the time of acquisition of the material. Students given inappropriate contextual information recalled less material than students given no contextual information. The results extend previous research with sentences to larger units of connected discourse and are discussed within the framework of schema shifting, a cognitive process essential in the comprehension of continuous prose.