Educable mentally retarded students were taught a verbal mediation learning strategy to determine if their performance pattern would correspond to learning potential designations derived with nonverbal materials. In comparisons of regular and special class groups using a picture paired-associates learning task, special class high-scorers performed…

To obtain an a priori estimate of natural language mediators (NLM's) 320 pairs of words with the consonant-vowel-consonant-pattern (CVC's) were broken into four series of 90 pairs and presented to 240 male and female undergraduates. Pairs were shown for 15 seconds while the subjects wrote down any associative device or NLM they could generate that…

Two experiments were conducted to assess the effects of elaborated presentation on noun-pair retention. A 2 x 2 factorial design was used with aural-verbal presentation (standard versus elaborated) and visual-pictorial presentation (standard versus elaborated). Subjects for one experiment were 64 second-grade children from a Mexican-American…

RESEARCH IS REPORTED HERE CONCERNING THE ASSUMPTION THAT ITEMS IN A LIST MUTUALLY AFFECT EACH OTHER IN VERBAL LIST-LEARNING. THE AUTHOR CONSIDERS BOTH THE MODE OF THE DATA ANALYSIS AND THE METHOD OF S-R (STIMULUS RESPONSE) PRESENTATION FOR A NUMBER OF RESTRICTED THEORETICAL ASSUMPTIONS INVOLVING ITEM INTERACTIONS IN S-R LIST-LEARNING EXPERIMENTS.…

The effect of presentation time on learning under varying mediation instructions demonstrated a time-dependent difference in the facilitating effect of imagery generation or sentence generation instructions. Subjects were junior high school students working in a paired associate task with concrete nouns. Both cognitive strategies were more…

This study was designed to investigate the functional similarity of the mental processes children use to learn verbal tasks and pictorial tasks. Children in grades 3 and 6 (n=144) and in grade 9 (n=112) were given four short paired-associate tasks entitled Pictures, Concrete Words, Abstract Words, and Japanese Characters. The tasks consisted of…

A three-way design was used to assess the effect of imagery instructions in noun-pair learning. The three principal factors were instructions (imagery versus rehearsal versus control), presentation mode (words versus pictures), and grade (1, 3, 6, and 11). Sixty subjects were drawn from each grade and randomly assigned to the six conditions.…

Aptitude by treatment interactions are investigated in the context of paired associate learning. Individuals are grouped by preference for visual or verbal items on classifying lists of paired associates and these groups are used to predict performance on criterion lists. (DG)

This research on factors influencing verbal learning and retention has used new techniques, attacked new problems, and tested new theories while trying to keep the experiments systematic. Studies conducted involved (1) the effect of varying the length of the intertrial interval on the learning and retention of different types of learning tasks;…

Eighty sixth-grade subjects, split into five independent groups, learned two PA lists of 12 noun pairs each. Two groups performed under traditional transfer conditions with lists conforming to a negative transfer paradigm, A-B, A-C, or to a reference paradigm A-B, C-D. Two other groups learned the same lists under a syntactic PA method where the…

Sixty young men between 18 and 26 years of age and 60 within the 65-75 year age range, matched for verbal ability and socioeconomic status, were given two paired associate learning tasks differing in level of difficulty under neutral, supportive, and challenging instructions. Older persons revealed a greater performance decrement on the more…

Eight experiments studied the following aspects of associative strategies in learning: classification; verbalization at three developmental levels; verbalization by normal and educable children; facilitation of associative learning among educable retardates; effectiveness of familiarization and differentiation training on the successful employment…

This research contrasts the learning effects of an affective dimension of meaningfulness with the word-quality of consonant-vowel-consonant trigrams. Subject rated trigrams for both "association value"--having word-quality versus lacking word-quality--and "reinforcement value"--liking versus disliking the trigram regardless of word quality. Paired…

THE REPORT DESCRIBES 13 EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES OF LEARNING IN CHILDREN BETWEEN FOUR AND 12 YEARS OF AGE. THE EXPERIMENTS CONCERN--(1) THE ISOLATION CONDITIONS UNDER WHICH ELABORATIVE FACILITATION OF LEARNING OCCURS, AND (2) THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ELABORATION AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN LEARNING PROFICIENCY. BECAUSE CHILDREN LEARN NOUN PAIRS AND…