Nouns are generally recalled and recognized better in memory tasks, although several theoretical positions and a variety of empirical tasks indicate the importance of verbs to sentences. To try to resolve this paradox, several experiments were designed to explore the efficiency of various sentence elements as cues in recognition memory. Subjects for the experiments were students enrolled in an introductory psychology course at Dartmouth College. In one experiment concreteness of the stimuli did not interact with the type of distractor; however, verb phrase changes were harder to recognize than noun phrase changes when synonym distractors were used. This result was replicated in two other experiments, a forced-choice recognition paradigm and an experiment involving whole sentences where the derivational similarity of verbs and nouns was controlled. Two additional experiments indicated that the effect could not be attributed to characteristics of the English language or to superior memory for form information in nouns. The total results are interpreted as suggesting that subjects process different parts of a sentence to different semantic levles, with verbs receiving more semantic representation and nouns more orthographic or phonological representation. (Author/MKM)