96 male 10th grade students received 2 learning and recall trials with a list ot 79 words at 1 of 3 levels of content abstractness. 1/2 of the Ss were given the words in syntactic order; the remainder saw the words in a random order. Abstractness affected total recall scores and the type of word recalled. A triple interaction indicated that recall was facilitated by syntactic order on the 2nd trial only when the content of the passage was highly concrete. Results support the hypothesis that thematic storage is in the form of imagery. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)