The main aim of this study was to compare children diagnosed as dysphonetic and dyseidetic on a number of mental processing variables to determine if opposite patterns of relative strength and weakness between the groups could be documented. Another aim was to externally validate the diagnostic criteria, which were based on standardized clinical…

Examines story retention after one-week interval as a function of topic familiarity and test-item relatedness. Second- and fifth-grade children participated. (MP)

Children from kindergarten, second, and fifth grade were verbally presented a passage containing an equal number of idea units which were relevant versus irrelevant to the main theme of a story. For all grade levels, relevant idea units were recalled to a greater extent than idea units irrelevant to the main theme. (CS)

Examines the hypothesis that an attentional preference for an imitator is a function of the magnitude of reinforcement associated with that person, and measures response uncertainty, a construct considered important in the effectance arousal theory often used to explain "being imitated" effects. (Author/RH)

Males and females from grades 3, 6 and college viewed sets of five or seven letters in a 4x4 matrix and remembered either names of the letters, positions of the letters within the matrix or both letters and positions. At all grade levels females remembered letters better than positions, males did equally well on both. (MS)

In a study of second graders, results supported the hypothesis that recognition memory would be disrupted when children's attention control strategy required the same cognitive operations as the task material to be studied. (Author/MP)

Two studies were conducted with 8- and 10-year-old children to examine sources of age and skill differences in verbal analogical reasoning. Discussion focuses on the child's "problem space" for the analogy task and possible differences in task understanding that lead to strategy and process differences in older versus younger and skilled versus…

Four experiments studied effects of difficulty of word identification on optional conceptual processing by second, third, and fifth graders, and college students in a cued recall task. Results indicated that contrastive processing facilitates recall, and that difficulty of word identification may limit the extent of optional contrastive…

Tests second- and sixth-grade students' incidental memory for words under acoustic- and semantic-processing conditions. The findings were predicted by an associative-processing account of incidental memory previously advanced by Ghatala (1981) and indicate that both knowledge-base development and processing activity determine children's incidental…

Kindergarten through third grade children's responses to concrete and verbal class-inclusion problems were compared under several presentation formats. Children initially had more difficulty with the verbal task which was highly specific in format than with the concrete tasks. These differences, however, were easily eliminated by an extensive…

This study tests the hypothesis that individual differences in locus of control orientation may mediate elementary school students' responses to positive verbal feedback. A total of 30 kindergarten through fourth grade subjects were assessed for locus of control orientation using the Bialer Children's Locus of Control Questionnaire. To establish a…

Two experiments, involving 90 first-grade children, were conducted to test a retrieval-inefficiency explanation for the failure of visual imagery to facilitate young children's prose recall. (Author/MP)

Two experiments, designed to examine the developmental changes in the modification of visual memory by verbal information, are described in this paper. In both experiments, first, third, and fifth grade children and college students were shown slides of short episodes followed by oral questions. Questions either described or did not describe…

Two experiments evaluated the effects of mnemonic training upon 5- and 10-year-old children's learning and retention of patterns at varying intervals. Subjects were 172 middle class children evenly distributed across the two age groups. Experiment I investigated the effects of individual strategies (perceptual exploration, organization of…

This study focused on two questions concerning children's attention to verbal stimulus: How do children of different reading ability attend to repeatedly presented words? Are there differences in children's patterns of attention to words as compared to less meaningful materials? Toward the end of an academic year, 40 first-graders and 40…