Provides further evidence of the psychological importance of semantic roles for verbal learning and broadens the realm of earlier work with semantic roles by using connected prose rather than individual sentences. (HOD)

The hypothesis that free recall involves the generation of candidate items followed by a decision process was tested in a situation which compared a standard recall test with a test that involved the overt generation and recognition of candidate items. (SW)

Reports on research on the effect of various encoding and retrieval conditions on sentence recall. (AM)

Two aspects of memory for prose were investigated. The amount of information remembered and the semantic interpretation assigned to ambiguous paragraphs. Task instructions and exposure duration of passages were varied. Recall and recognition measures indicated students remembered more with instructions requiring processing at a semantic level.…

Many theories of memory assume memory representations are abstract and exclude specific lexical information. Results of three experiments in this study suggest lexical information is present and persists in memory representations of meaning. A word-based theory of memory should be preferred over available theoretical alternatives. (CHK)

This study tested predictions from Clark and Haviland's formalization of what people do when integrating information. Subjects were presented with simple sentences issued from a set of complex ideas, and asked to reconstruct the complete ideas. Results support predictions based on a recoding strategy formalized by Clark and Haviland. (CHK)

The present study was designed to explore what subjects can and will do spontaneously in memory retrieval situations. Subjects were kindergarten, third grade and college students. (SB)

A variant of the Peterson (1959) paradigm was used to investigate retrieval of single pairs of items varying in imagery value. Latency to respond showed that if one item was concrete, no differential retrieval speeds were found. This result supports an organizational view of imagery. (CHK)

THE PROBLEM WAS TO DETERMINE WHICH COMBINATIONS OF VERBAL AND GRAPHIC MATERIALS LEAD TO THE MOST EFFICIENT LEARNING. NINETY-ONE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE STUDENTS WERE DIVIDED INTO EIGHT GROUPS WHICH READ THE SAME INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIAL (ON ELECTRICAL CIRCUITRY) IN VERBAL, GRAPHIC, VERBAL-GRAPHIC, OR GRAPHIC-VERBAL FORM. HALF OF THE SUBJECTS WERE…

Evidence was found for an ability to monitor during learning the degree of retrievability of the to-be-learned material from memory at time of a subsequent test. Students were given three successive study trials to learn either a list of 60 paired associates or a free-recall list of 60 "unrelated" words. During a fourth study trial, they rated on…

The effects of arousal on verbal learning and memory are presently controversial. Investigators using different definitions of arousal, different tasks, and different methods have (as one would expect) produced different findings in the literature: (a) Arousal during acquisition leads to poor immediate but better delayed recall; (b) Arousal during…

It was predicted that verbalization of prose materials would produce greater anxiety but would also result in greater retention of the passages, that prior knowledge of the verbalization requirement would lead to better retention, and that induced expectancy to verbalize would result in better retention than would no expectancy. Results indicated…

The results of this study indicate that age differences in the recall of high frequency word lists are not related to the total presentation time of the lists but appear to be affected by differences in retrieval processes as a function of age. (JMB)

A Markov model was proposed to account for the short-term retention of the spatial arrangement of letters. The model was fit to three spatial location recall conditions in experiments which differed in distractor task. The rate of information transfer from primary to secondary memory was affected by changes in distractor task. (SW)

Fifth grade students completed ten trials of recalling familiar nouns plus two summary trials. Alpha factor analysis indicated that the measurement procedures may be conceived of as derived from a single domain and the use of a summary trial was a simple way to increase the generalizability of a particular measurement procedure. (Author/DEP)