Determined whether 143 undergraduates were sensitive to the difference between sentences involving an ordered "and" (*) and those involving an unordered "and" (+), a distinction contingent upon knowledge of some semantic properties of the conjoined verbs. Performance on 2 comprehension tasks revealed that Ss did distinguish between + and * sentences. Consistent with this, performance on a memorial task indicated that when verb order was permuted, Ss were significantly more likely to falsely recognize + sentences than * sentences, to be expected if verbs in sentences of the latter kind but not of the former are entered in memory in ordered fashion. The principal unexpected finding is that on the paraphrase task, even when 2 additional strengthened versions were also employed, verb order was often permuted for disordered * sentences, normalizing them and assimilating the order of events described to conventional order. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)