Two experiments were conducted to determine whether the connective structure of a passage might protect interrelated information from interference by irrevelant information in sentence recognition. Subjects of both experiments were college students enrolled in introductory psychology classes. In each, a rating task for unconnected phrases was interpolated between an incidental processing task for sentences and a forced choice recognition task. Phrases were designed to interfere with either the exact wording or the specific meaning of sentences, yet to be unrelated to the unifying theme. Interference on each level was obtained in memory for a list of thematically unrelated sentences, but not in memory for passage sentences, except under conditions in which the phrase pairs were explicitly related to the passage. These results seem to confirm the facilitative role of passage structure. (Appendixes include test sentences and graphs of results.) (Author/JL)