It sometimes happens that one is unable to recall a word or name that he feels he knows very well. This state of frustrated recall is referred to as a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experience. Two experiments were devised to compare the ability of a weak trace and a decoding-failure model to predict the conditions under which TOT reports would be most…

This paper is a draft for the American Psychological Association Symposium on the conditioning of verbal behavior and attitudes. The author presents the results of several studies he conducted in the classical conditioning of meaning and attitude. These studies attempt to control the measurement effects created by extraneous variables operating on…

The influence of the demographic factors of sex, race, and social class on education of relations in picture pairs by high school students is examined. The bulk of this report is composed of three tables which list the picture-pair items for which frequency of relation education differed significantly between males and females, between whites and…

Verbal analogy items, consisting of an ambiguous stimulus word pair and two unambiguous response word pairs as choice alternatives, were presented to psychology students in a counterbalanced design to discover if preferences existed between the two competing relations in each item. The data were analyzed to see if these preferences ordered…

This paper represents an attempt to study the graphemic-phonemic associations that are formed during the acquisition and subsequent retention of beginning reading responses and to evaluate the heuristic value of viewing the formation of these associations as a classical conditioning process. Two experiments--one on first graders and one on first…

This study was designed to assess whether negative transfer in children's paired-associate learning could be reduced by changing the levels of meaning at which stimuli were encoded on the two lists. It was hypothesized that changes in meaning levels from a first to a second list would result in less interference than conditions where stimuli…

The purpose of this study was to resolve the focal attention versus context controversy. Eighty first-grade and 84 second-grade children from a metropolitan school system served as subjects. Subjects in each grade were randomly assigned to each of four experimental conditions: picture-word, no picture-word, picture-sentence, and no…

Letter-letter, letter-number, and number-letter paired associates were used in this A-B, B-C, A-C study. There were two A-C lists, the positive-transfer stimulus-items of one became the negative-transfer stimulus-items of the other, and vice versa. Twenty subjects were included and each learned one A-C list. The main effects included, among…

Examined whether reading disabled children differed in the utilization of rules in a paired associate learning task. In two experiments, children were assigned to one of three conditions: (a)nonrule, (b)consistent rule, or (c)inconsistent rule. When present, the rule was based on semantic opposites. (Author/NH)

Describes a paired-associate learning experiment in which American Sign Language signs of high and low translucency and high and low cheremic similarity were presented to sign-naive subjects. One hypothesis, that translucency would facilitate learning, was confirmed; a second, that cheremic similarity would retard sign learning, was not.…

Compared the effects of methylphenidate, pemoline, and a placebo on learning and retention in 36 hyperactive children. Results showed both methylphenidate and pemoline improved learning and relearning performance on spelling and produced a similar but less clear enhancement of learning on the paired-associate learning task. (JAC)

An investigation was undertaken to determine whether highly aroused (e.g. highly anxious) students are handicapped with regard to their ability to learn through deep processing and elaboration. The hypothesis that well-developed deep and elaborative habits of thought might counteract the disruptive effects that excessive arousal has upon students…

Two questions were addressed regarding the utility of the keyword method, originally developed as an instructional technique to facilitate foreign language vocabulary acquisition: (1) the method's applicability to other common school learning tasks; and (2) students' use of the method as a self-initiated study strategy. (Author/AL)

Recall performance on a paired-associate learning task was investigated as a function of word imagery modality (visual or auditory), presentation mode (visual or auditory), and sex. Analysis showed greater recall of visual imagery words, and the results are consistent with Paivio's (1971) conceptual-peg hypothesis. (Author)

The effects of neutral, separate, and interactive imagery instructions on the learning performance of first and fifth graders were compared for both single-item and paired-associate tasks. Results revealed that both younger and older children using images did show facilitation, compared with those not using images. (Author/GK)