The recall of Japanese sentences varying in word order and grammatical voice was studied by the method of prompted recall with 80 Ss. Verbatim and semantic criteria were used for scoring responses. In verbatim recall, word order of stimulus sentences and prompt words as well as voice were significant factors. In semantic recall, only logical categorie of prompt words was significant. Syntactically transformed and/or semantically equivalent responses gave evidence in support of `Message transmission hypothesis' and the pragmatic function of syntatic structure.