Examined relationship of phonological awareness, verbal short-term memory, and visual-verbal paired associate (PA) learning with word recognition and decoding skills in 6- to 11- year-olds. Findings suggest that PA learning and phonological awareness tasks tap two separate mechanisms involved in learning to read. (Author/KB)

In three studies, the effects of visual and phonological distinctness on the visual-verbal paired associate learning of dyslexic and normal readers at the age of 10-12 were examined. We hypothesized that both groups would be equally affected by the visual distinctness of the pictures, whereas the learning performance of the dyslexic children would…

Reported an experiment on the effects of taxonomic organization on 7- and 11-year-olds' free and cued recall of two- and four-category lists. Analysis used a stages-of-learning model that simultaneously delivered estimates of the impact of these manipulations on storage and retrieval components of recall. (Author/CB)

Describes three computer programs designed to control and execute standard methods for paired associate learning. They can be used in classroom demonstrations or laboratory exercises in experimental psychology. (RM)

Three experiments examined the effect of degree of learning on the amount of normal long-term forgetting of supraspan verbal lists. (Author/PN)

The effects of rate repetition, self-generated visualization, and supplied visuals on the memorization of concrete noun-word pairs were investigated using 27 gifted children in grades four to six. The hypothesis that self-generated imagery techniques would be superior to supplied visuals was not supported. (Author/PN)

Seventy-nine first-year and 85 third-year students were tested on the meanings of French words from vocabulary lists. Twenty percent were then taught memory-improvement strategies, 20 percent were taught strategies and given guided practice, and 20 percent learned the lists without aids. The strategies significantly improved the performance of…

The effectiveness of the mnemonic keyword method was examined in four experiments with college students learning lists of pairs of Spanish nouns and their English equivalents. Implications for the further study and application of the keyword method are discussed. (Author/GK)

This study examined the relationship between the visual elaboration characteristic of paired-associate learning and figural elaboration as found in the graphic representations of preadolescents (ages 8-12) and as measured by nonverbal creativity measures. Significant correlations between figural variables and one or both visual variables were…

Argues that a broad dimension of useful experiments would be suggested if the field supplemented its current research strategy with a second strategy focused more explicitly on the extension of generality. (HOD)

The extant picture-learning research does not address confusing word pairs that are not concrete (e.g., in and into). In this study, university students viewed 11 timed Web pages containing information on confusing word pairs. Each page addressed one word pair and distinguished the words with examples (example group), examples and rules (rule…

Adults learned the meanings of rare words (e.g., gloaming) and then made meaning judgments on pairs of words. The 1st word was a trained rare word, an untrained rare word, or an untrained familiar word. Event-related potentials distinguished trained rare words from both untrained rare and familiar words, first at 140 ms and again at 400-600 ms…

To test a deduction from Carroll's Model of School Learning (i.e., increasing a learner's perserverance will not alter degree of learning or learning rate), time needed to learn a task under an encouragement condition designed to increase perserverance was compared to learning time under a discouragement condition. As predicted, no significant…

Three experiments compared congenitally blind and sighted adults and children on paired-associate, free-recall, and imaging tasks presumed to involve visual imagery in memory. In all three, blind subjects' performances were remarkably similar to the sighted. Results challenge previous explanations of performance such as Paivio's (1971). (Author/RD)

The kind of semantic information that facilitates relearning was investigated. The paradigm consisted of three stages: (1) learn a list of number-word pairs; (2) return for a retention test; and (3) relearn a new list of pairs that have various kinds of semantic relatedness to the originally learned pairs. (Author/CTM)