Two studies examined the hypothesis that college students' memory for lecture material would be enhanced by the lecturer's use of critically placed pauses at the end of lecture sentences to encourage deep, elaborative processing. Pauses had no effect on subjects' (n = 46) recognition of verbatim reproductions of stimulus sentences in Exp. 1. A small, but significant effect was obtained in Exp. 2 in which subjects (n = 24) recalled more information from sentences presented with elaborative pauses than from sentences presented without pauses, both immediately following the lecture and five days later. Results were interpreted in terms of Craik's depth of processing theory.
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