The text synthesis method was used to examine effects of corrective feedback, length of passage, and content on text comprehension as measured by recall and recognition. Two randomly ordered passages from the biography of Enrico Fermi of 13 and 19 sentences each were presented. Subjects rearranged the sentences to reconstruct meaningful texts. Feedback did not influence recall, recognition, or concordance with the original order. Retrieval was not related to concordance. Recall and recognition were proportionally higher for shorter versions and for the more complex selections. The paradigm is promising as it shows the importance of content and passage length as well as the problems of providing feedback for processing discourse.
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