Abstract: The influence of contextual information on the recall of abstract andconcrete sentences of Chinese language was studied in a series of experi-ments.In the first experiment,concrete target sentences and abstract targetsentences were presented in either a coherent paragraph context oraran-dom paragraph context. Subjects recalled more concrete sentences thanabstract ones in the random context, but there was no difference betwe-en the two groups of students when the sentences were presented in acoherent context. In the second experiment, a moderately coherent con-text was added, which included many of the same nouns as the coherentparagraph, but was not as thematically coherent. The result showed thatthe moderately coherent context provided intermediate facilitation for therecall of abstract sentences relative to the random context and the coher-ent context, but the context structure did not affect the recall of concre-te sentences. The result were interpreted in accordance with the differ-ential availability of contextual information for abstract and concrete sen-tences of Chinese language in support of the context avalilability model.

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