The purposes of this study were to replicate and extend the list learning results in a prose context, and to explore both the learning of incidental material and the effect of a text organization pretest and posttest information about passage structure. One hundred twenty-eight college undergraduates read a 460 word prose story, which mentioned the proper names of 16 types of creatures and underlined a specific class of items (e.g., large sea creatures) or a general class (e.g., living creatures). Overtly responding to the smaller number of items (but presumable evaluating text items against a more distinctive categorical criterion) increased recall without increasing reading time. Specific search produced higher recall if subjects were informed about the text structure before reading, but not if the information was given after reading. (WR)