Definitions of four rare words were read to 259 undergraduates who were asked to record letters and syllables of the words, at the tip of the tongue. Results corresponded to an earlier study, with morpheme-like clusters evident. Results indicate an organizing memory system for words used in speech. (CHK)

Subjects studied and were tested for recognition and recall of target words on lists of cue-target word pairs. List-cued recall was higher than non-cued recall, suggesting that recognition failure is independent of subjects' familiarity with task requirements. This contradicts attribution of encoding specificity phenomena to subjects' confusion.…

Research supported by grants HD-01888 and HD-01136 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and grant No. GS-541 from the National Science Foundation.

THE VERBAL BEHAVIOR OF CHILDREN FROM FOUR GRADE LEVELS (10, EIGHT, SIX, AND FOUR) WAS INVESTIGATED BY HAVING EACH SUBJECT (S) LEARN TO FREE-RECALL THREE 20-WORD LISTS OF UNRELATED WORDS. A MULTITRIAL PROCEDURE WAS USED IN WHICH SS EXPERIENCED 10 CONSECUTIVE LEARNING AND TEST TRIALS ON EACH LIST. TWO MEASURES WERE USED TO ANALYZE BOTH INTRALIST AND…

Previous research has found that spoken rehearsal is superior to silent rehearsal during verbal discrimination learning. The frequency theory posits that verbal discrimination (VD) learning improves as the frequency differential between the correct and incorrect member of each pair increases. Erlebacher, Hill, and Wallace (1967) tested this…

This study tests the hypothesis that labeling facilitates recall in nursery school children if and only if it leads to rehearsal. Subjects were 34 children ranging in age from 47 to 53 months. During pretraining, those children in the Label group named pictures of animals and fruits as they were presented, while those in the No Label group matched…

An experiment was conducted to determine if the structure of a stimulus sentence--as evidenced in the recall pattern of the sentence--could be predicted from information contained in the sentence associations it elicited. Sentence associations to 20 simple sentences were collected from a group of subjects. The free recall of the same 20 sentences…

Twenty mentally retarded children (mean age 10 years) and 40 nonretarded children (grades 2 and 5) learned pairs of pictures in a single-function order (terms of each pair were in the same position throughout) or in a double-function order (all items were re-paired). (Author)

When subjects are tested on ordered information, performance is better on inferences than on information actually presented during training. Humphreys suggested that superiority on inferences derives from differential frequency. This experiment refutes that position, demonstrating that superiority on inferences is observed even when frequency is…

Tests, with five groups, the production of facilitative transfer effects with the use of five abstract passages. It was predicted, based on assumptions about knowledge structures that three of the groups would recall more from the second passage than would the latter two groups. The results confirmed this prediction. (Author/DEP)

Recalls from five passages learned by undergraduates in the course of growing up in America were obtained. Recalls, while partial, were exact with no evidence of constructive memory. Results fit a simple model of associative chaining retrieval of passively stored surface structure units. (CHK)

Examines whether, after a single reading, the recall of text elements depends on the length of the passage. Results show more detail was remembered 23 hours later for short passages than for long. Concludes that negative effects of passage length on test performance were due in part to acquisition processes rather than retrieval. (EKN)

Describes a study of the recall of narrative prose. Serial structure at first influenced which elements were remembered, but as the Ss remembered more, the story grammar structure became the dominant influence over the elements remembered. (Author/RM)

Three experiments investigated a characteristic of the propositions that underlie sentences. For some of the sentences tested, the same concepts occurred repeatedly across the underlying propositions; for others, concepts were seldom repeated. Repetitions were shown to facilitate sentence processing. (Author/RM)