Children in kindergarten, third grade, and fifth grade were presented a list of either pictures or words (with items presented varying numbers of times on the study trail). In both picture and word conditions, half of the subjects estimated how many times each item had been presented (absolute judgments) and the other half judged which of two…

When 112 fifth- and sixth-graders were observed for their use of one of two possible rehearsal strategies in verbal discrimination learning tasks, the strategy in which the children generated a functional explanation of the word showed a positive influence on simple frequency discriminations. Data analyses also indicate that under this strategy…