The authors examined whether exposing young students to spellings as they learn proper names would facilitate memory for the spoken names when tested without the spellings present (i.e., orthographic facilitation), whether emergent readers with letter knowledge would show this effect, and whether phonemic segmentation (PS) training would enhance…

In 2 experiments, the authors examined whether spellings improve students' memory for pronunciations and meanings of new vocabulary words. Lower socioeconomic status minority 2nd graders (M = 7 years 7 months; n = 20) and 5th graders (M = 10 years 11 months; n = 32) were taught 2 sets of unfamiliar nouns and their meanings over several learning…

Working from previous findings that learning of paired nouns improves when the nouns are joined by a verb rather than a preposition, and by a preposition rather than a conjunction, the present study investigates the factors influencing this form-class effect and offers an explanation in terms of transformational grammar. (Author/FWB)

Third- and sixth-grade readers were asked to label sets of pictures printed with distracting words (either nouns, adjectives, or functors) and nonsense syllables. (Author/JMB)

Second and sixth graders were asked to learn noun pairs linked by various types of verbal connectives: Verbs, unmarked and marked comparative adjectives, polar antonym adjective pairs, and conjunctions. Results indicated that all contexts produced better learning than conjunctions, that comparative adjective effects were superior to the polar-pair…

Results indicated that variations in deep structure grammatical relations but not surface structure complexity influenced noun pair retrieval. (Author)

This investigation was intended to study the effects of some linguistic variables on child and adult memories for sentences when recall was prompted by nouns embedded in the sentences. Its purpose was to examine for developmental differences in sentence processing systems expected by psycholinguistic theory and research. A group of 64 subjects,…