The experiments reported the number of words recalled from sentences consisting of 4 (Experiment 1) or 5 terms (Experiments 2 and 3). In the case of 4 terms, the sentences were of the form
In the park the hippie touched the debutante.
And in the case of 5 terms Anderson (1972) used sentences like
In the park the hippie touched the debutante at night.
If a sentence has n terms and one term is used to cue recall of the sentence, there are 2^(n-1) possible patterns of recall including all remaining items recalled, no items recall, and various possibilities of partial recall. In all of these experiments there was about 60% total failure of recall. The real interest lies in the distribution of the remaining data in terms of the probability of a particular pattern of items being recalled as a function of the number of items in the pattern. With the exception of recalling nothing, the probability of recalling all elements is much more frequent than any other recall pattern; however, there are many possible patterns of partial recall and the total frequency of all of these patterns of partial recall is about double the frequency of perfect recall.