Within-Sentence Distribution and Retention of Contentwords and function words

Experiments with free immediate recall of lists of unconnected words usually reveal a saddle-shaped ‘serial position curve’: high frequency of recall in the items obtaining the first positions (‘primacy effect’) of the list and those obtaining the last positions (‘recency effect’), and, in the words of Murdock Jr., “a horizontal asymptote spanning the primacy and recency effect” (cf. Figure 5.1).