Assesses the relative importance of synonymity and antonymity for memory encoding of words for second and sixth graders. Also, the variable of association strength is investigated for both groups through the presentation of false-recognition stimuli. (DP)

The purpose of this study was to clarify some of the dynamics of test anxiety in the foreign-language classroom: to evaluate the effect of different test instructions (calculated to arouse or reduce test anxiety) on the test performance of foreign language pupils. (Author)

Children's use of the middle concept was assessed in two developmental studies. Experiment 1, with kindergarten through fifth-grade students, showed marked improvement in the mastery of the middle concept across elementary grades. In Experiment 2, discrimination pretraining with two nonoverlapping stimulus sets transferred to the novel test…

Supported by grant MH-13515-02 from the U. S. Public Health Service.

The role of meaning in the learning of verbally presented paired associates (PAs) is described by means of an experiment with a replication. A printed PA list containing six different types of items was presented to Sixth Graders. Four of the item types consisted of sentence-embedded PAs on the study trials, followed by test trial cues varying in…

Three measures of verbal input organization (category clustering, associative clustering, and subjective organization) were employed to compare the performances of 30 normal and 30 educable mentally retarded (EMR) elementary school males of equal chronological age on various free recall learning tasks. Subjects were given 12 successive trials on…

The verbal discrimination learning of elementary school children was assessed in two experiments. In both experiments, Ss were given either regular discrimination learning instructions (control), instructions to pronounce the correct pair member aloud three times during study trials (vocalization), or instructions to generate a visual image of the…

Experiments are reported in which semantically interrelating sentences were presented to subjects as discrete items, and inference tests were given to measure the degree to which the similar information had been stored in the same memory system. Results suggest that verbal information is sometimes encoded into an episodic system. (Author/RM)

White and black fifth grade children, representing two levels of self-concept and social class, recalled nouns which they had prerated for likability. High self-concept white children recalled positively rated words more readily than negatively rated words, while high self-concept black children recalled negative words more readily than positive…

The false recognition procedure was used to determine the relative dominance of visual and verbal memory organization at two grade levels. The results indicated that visual encoding was predominant for first graders, but that both visual and verbal encoding occurred with fourth graders. (MS)

In three experiments, performance of children in grades ranging from 1 to 9 was investigated in a repeated trials, free recall experiment. Although performance on the accuracy and clustering measures increased with grade, interactions between grade and other independent variables were generally lacking. (Author/WY)

The primary aim of the current study was to identify the strongest independent predictors of reading comprehension using word reading, language and memory variables in a normal sample of 180 children in grades 3-5, with a range of word reading skills. It was hypothesized that orthographic processing, receptive vocabulary and verbal working memory…

Meaningfulness values, assessed via the production method, were obtained on 40 trigrams for 120 children, 40 each in second and sixth grade. These norms were subsequently used in a free-recall learning study. (MS)