Thirty learning disabled and thirty nondisabled children (mean age 10 years) were compared on a paired associate learning task that simulated the process of sight word learning. Two instructional variables (response competition and stimulus complexity) that have been hypothesized as contributing to overloading in learning disabled children, were…

The aim of this study was to explore the effects of the following memory encoding variables on human learning: depth (implying progression through levels of encoding); spread (elaboration of information at a given level) and; congruence (integration of the form of encoding and the material to be learned). Encoding refers to the way in which…

AN INFORMATION TRANSMISSION MODEL THAT ADVOCATES LEARNING VIA ONLY ONE SENSE MODALITY (E.G. VISUAL) IS THE BASIS FOR SEVERAL SERIES OF EXPERIMENTS, EACH SUBJECTED TO RIGOROUS STATISTICAL ANALYSIS. CONCLUSIONS ARE--LEARNING IS NOT FACILITATED BY REDUNDANT INFORMATION PRESENTED SIMULTANEOUSLY THROUGH THE AUDITORY AND VISUAL SENSE MODALITIES, IT IS…

IN A PAIRED-ASSOCIATE LEARNING EXPERIMENT, THE SUBJECT'S OWN VOICE AND THEN THAT OF ANOTHER WERE HEARD TO TEST THE EFFECTIVENESS OF RECALL OF BOTH PRESENTATIONS. HALF OF THE WORDS FROM EACH VOICE WAS PRESENTED BY AIR-CONDUCTED SOUND TO EARPHONES AND HALF BY OCCLUDED BONE CONDUCTION. THE ORDER OF PRESENTATION OF VOICES, WORD-PAIR HALF-BLOCKS, AND…

In order to determine if infants possessed contingency awareness and if it were related to a temporal unit, two hypotheses were constructed. (1) Reinforcement of a response would probably lead to emission of that response only if the infant's next response occurred within a period of time during which he could remember the preceding…

The purpose of these studies was to test a theory of associative context (defined as the association between two words in a pair) on recognition memory. The theory states that culturally associated words in a pair and nonassociated words in a pair differ after a single study trial in terms of their frequency representation in memory. Two…

This paper reports three experiments concerning methodological issues in studies on incidental learning performance which use verbal and nonverbal procedures and which appear to be hampered by differences in stimulus materials, learning opportunities, and dependent measures. The first study, using 128 children from grades 3, 5, 7, and 9, attempted…

Thirty-six normal 5-year-olds and 60 educable mentally retarded (EMR) students with a mean age of 7 years were tested to determine whether specific formats of interrogatives would be instrumental in inducing the generation of effective verbal mediators. Ten EMR Ss and 6 normal Ss were tested on 21 paired associates in each six experimental…

Ninety-nine preoperational stage children learned 24 pictorial paired-associates at one of three levels of concreteness: low detail line drawings, high detail line drawings, high detail line drawings with a verbal prompt. Within each of these groups, one-third of the subjects received either visual attentional training, no training, or were…

This study examined the effects on long-term retention of variations in intensity and of temporal parameters of arousal following a single learning trial in a paired-associate task. The subjects were 56 female university students. Intensity of arousal was manipulated by using two levels of white noise--75 decibels and 90 decibels sound pressure…

The effects of five verbal elaboration conditions on the paired associate learning of 50 elementary-aged educable mentally retarded children were investigated. Four of the conditions, crossing functional and positional relations in familiar or unfamiliar events, were included in a two-factor design (type of relation x familiarity); the fifth…

Subjects, differing in imagery ability, learned a list of paired associates with the presence of a verbal context related to the stimulus item, with a pictorial context related to the stimulus item, or without the presence of any context. Following testing for recall, the subjects were required to learn one of two transfer lists. Both lists were…

Two experiments aimed at extending the principles of paired-associates learning transfer to the acquisition of reading skills are reported. Approximately 15 first graders were randomly assigned to each of the 10 treatment conditions. In the first experiment, four types of letter training were compared to two control conditions. The experimental…

The deep structure description of a sentence marks the actual grammatical relationships that exist among the words. It is in the deep structure that "meaning" is rendered. Two sentences that are marked differently in deep structure might give rise to the same description in surface structure. Three experiments examined the "psychological reality"…