Forty first-grade and 40 seventh-grade children were assigned at random to four groups of 20 each (two at each age level) and were administered four study-test trials involving oral presentation and oral recall of a list of four sentences of the form article-adjective-noun-verb-adverb. Half of the subjects at each level of age were given semantically well integrated (SWI) sentences to learn, while the other half were given semantically poorly integrated (SPI) sentences to learn. The sentences were constructed with the assistance of college associative sentence norms, on the assumption that such norms are a reflection of mature semantic competence. For all measures of recall, the SWI sentences were recalled better than the SPI sentences regardless of age of the subjects. In addition, there was evidence that the words in SWI sentences were recoded into larger chunks for storage than the words in SPI sentences and that age tended to increase chunking for both SWI and SPI sentences. As anticipated, the only evidence for phrase-chunking was found in the group of seventh graders that was exposed to SPI sentences. (Author/DO)