Recent research in the area of prose comprehension is reviewed, including factors that affect amount of recall, representations of text structures, and use of world knowledge to aid comprehension. The need for more information processing models of comprehension is emphasized. Elaboration is considered important for comprehension and retention.…

Reports three experiments demonstrating that recall for words increases with deeper levels of processing and with longer rehearsal intervals. Asserts that there is no interaction between those strategies. (PMJ)

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…

Reports on research showing that when an event, or a problem, is repeated, the processing of that event is not necessarily repeated. Instead, sometimes the solution is remembered, and this is shown to influence subsequent retention, as well as such tasks as word perception. (AM)

Findings imply that while preschool children both enjoy and profit from listening to stories read to them in unelaborated fashion, they gain much more from observing and participating in the actions portrayed in the stories. (FL)

An investigation of a saturation advertising campaign to acquaint the public with changes in radio wavelengths showed that repeated presentation of material does not lead to learning unless appropriate encoding occurs. Such encoding will occur when subjects are allowed to use previously acquired learning strategies. (PMJ)

A study examined the effects of pictorial and verbal illustrations on the initial learning and long term retention of written instruction. Subjects were eighth and ninth grade students randomly assigned to one of two text conditions (literal or analogous instructions) under one of four pictorial conditions (no picture, functional drawing,…

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 main objective of the Goteborg Project on Non-Verbatim Learning was to arrive at a commensurable description of the process and outcome of non-verbatim learning, also referred to as meaningful verbal learning. Such a description was thought to be a necessary presupposition for any explanatory models both in experiments on learning and in the…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether children as young as second-graders could encode categorically within an abstract evaluative dimension. The study uses mode of stimulus presentation (auditory or visual) as an independent variable. The subjects were 40 white middle class children from grades 2, 4, and 6, who were randomly assigned…

A study examined the ability of 16 children in kindergarten, grade 2, and grade 4 to draw inferences based on the content of a narrative passage and to recognize inferences as derived from, rather than given by, text. An inference task, developed to assess the ability to make and recognize appropriate inferences, consisted of four orally presented…

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;…

A research project involving 16 experiments investigated the nature of the encoding process for verbal materials, particularly differences arising from mode of presentation. The results showed that a change in mode of presentation of items produced a recovery from interference in short term retention. Since intermodal interference was lower than…

Reports on a study that sought to test theories which predict that spacing between two items to be learned improves the probability of remembering at least one of the items. (AM)