Two experiments contrasted processing manipulations designed to focus readers' attention on sequential and relational aspects of passages with processing activities presumed to focus readers' attention on individual lexical items and the propositions in which they were embedded. Employing an intentional recall paradigm, both experiments found recall to be superior when the readers engaged in sequential and relational processing to recall when they performed individual item-specific lexical processing. These results disagree with those of previous work on individual item-specific lexical processing conducted with an incidental paradigm but agree closely with a broad range of studies that have focused on relational and sequential processing. The results are discussed in terms of differences between intentional and incidental learning paradigms.
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