In a study with 90 undergraduates it was found that the use of definite articles in a set of 17 sentences facilitated the connection of those sentences into a theme or story in memory. Those Ss who recalled the passage as a story remembered significantly more words and sentences and made more theme-related word substitutions in both immediate and long-term recall than did Ss who processed the passage as unrelated sentences. Different variables determined the amount recalled from each sentence, depending on whether the sentences were recalled as a story or not. The rated centrality of each sentence to the theme of the story correlated highly with the degree of recall of those sentences when they were recalled as a story. The rated image-evoking value and the order of sentence presentation (the latter only in immediate memory) correlated highly with recall when the sentences were recalled as unrelated to each other. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)