Thirty-six normal 5-year-olds and 60 educable mentally retarded (EMR) students with a mean age of 7 years were tested to determine whether specific formats of interrogatives would be instrumental in inducing the generation of effective verbal mediators. Ten EMR Ss and 6 normal Ss were tested on 21 paired associates in each six experimental…

The effects of five verbal elaboration conditions on the paired associate learning of 50 elementary-aged educable mentally retarded children were investigated. Four of the conditions, crossing functional and positional relations in familiar or unfamiliar events, were included in a two-factor design (type of relation x familiarity); the fifth…

The study examined the performance of 72 intellectually average children in primary grades and 72 educable mentally retarded adolescents (mean mental age 8 years) on target subsets of work pairs when employed in mixed lists. (Author/MC)

Thirty institutionalized mildly retarded adolescent Ss and 30 matched MA elementary school nonretarded Ss were presented 18 items for five free-recall trials in a study of basic determinants of clustering behavior (the recall of sequences of related items following their random presentation). (Author/DB)

Findings support the hypothesis that, at least with elementary age educable mentally retarded children, large effects of elaboration instruction on recall are not found when the learner is not permitted to overtly verbalize his elaborations. (Authors)

Pattern of results suggests that retardates were relatively deficient in the spontaneous use of effective rehearsal mechanisms, but could perform as well as normals when instructed to use a specific rehearsal strategy. (Authors)

Three experiments assessed the relative effectiveness of an imagery mnemonic on the paired-associate learning of 24 nonretarded and 24 educable mentally retarded adolescents. (Author/MC)

The effects of interspersed trials on prompted (P) and confirmation (C) paired associate learning were studied in 64 institutionalized educable mental retardates. Subjects were instructed to learn eight pairs of pictures which were presented by a slide projector. There were four groups in both the P and C condition. The treatment for these groups…

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…

Two studies investigated characteristics of verbal elaborations (length and number of relations provided by the syntactic construction) to determine what makes them effective mediators for young children. Study I treated the role of an elaboration's length in facilitating paired associate learning in 22 nursery school children. Data indicated that…