This study investigates the influence on sentence encoding of activating appropriate contextual knowledge. A group of 72 undergraduate students randomly assigned to four treatment groups read and were later asked to recognize sentences from a passage. In one group, subjects were told nothing about the passage from which the sentence was taken. In the other groups, the subjects were (1) told the title before reading the sentence, (2) told the title after the reading and before the testing, or (3) told the title before and asked to relate the sentence to it. After the initial passage reading, subjects were given a brief mathematical distractor test and then asked to identify sentences as old or new. Results show that title availability during encoding significantly increased both recognition of target sentences and rejection of distractor sentences. Providing the title immediately prior to testing but after reading did not improve performance over the no-title condition. It appears that awareness of context during encoding enables subjects to engage in unique encoding processes benefitting recognition as well as recall memory. (MSE)