The comprehensibility, interestingness, familiarity, and memorability of concrete and abstract instructional text were investigated in 4 experiments. Experiment 1 investigated relationships between ratings of concreteness, familiarity, interestingness, and comprehensibility in concrete and abstract sentences about historical figures. Experiment 2 investigated the immediate and delayed recall of those sentences, and employed rating norms from Experiment 1 as predictors of recall. Experiments 3 and 4 replicated aspects of Experiments 1 and 2 with paragraphs of varying length. Results indicated that concreteness (ease of Imagery) was the variable overwhelmingly most related to comprehensibility and recall
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Sadoski et al. (1993) studied this question.