Spoken connected discourse was interrupted for testing immediate recall at points where the speech just presented contained an identical sequence of words in one of two syntactic configurations. The clause unit previous to the one interrupted belonged in one condition to the immediate sentence, while in the other condition it was part of the previous sentence (e.g., “Before Donahue could finish, the members charged. Gaining access to the speaker's platform, they knocked down the local president twice.” vs. “Donahue was helpless to prevent members from gaining access to the speaker's platform. They knocked down the local president twice.”). Subjects were asked to listen normally to the speech and to write down as much as they could remember from just before the test pauses, or they were given the first word from the identical sequences as prompts (“gaining” in the example), and instructed to write down the speech from there up until the pauses. Results obtained from various verbatim measures of free and prompted recall support only the immediately heard clause and the immediate sentence as retrievable units in memory.