The purpose of this research was to examine the relationship between semantic memory or integration and general ability. The main hypotheses are as follows: (1) the ability to memorize meaningless materials will not correlate with general ability; (2) the ability to abstract meaning from semantically related propositions will correlate with general ability; and (3) correlations between recongition confidence and general ability will increase systematically as the amount of semantic inferencing in the test sentences increases. Two separate experiments were conducted. A task was designed that used both a rote, or literal, performance memory task and a semantic, or relational, performance memory task. Test sentences were varied along three dimensions. Experiment 1 showed that older, more able students integrated semantically related sentences better than younger, less able students. Experiment 2 results were consistent with those of Experiment 1: significant, moderate correlations between semantic memory and general ability were found. However, this relationship was not as strong as found in Experiment 1. Both experiment results supported previous research indicating that there is little relationship between literal recognition and general ability. However, the experimental manipulation in Experiment 2 failed to work as expected. (PN)