This summary of a program of research in children's learning describes the effects of pictures and visual imagery on children's cognitive performance. The role of individual differences is highlighted throughout the paper, as are variables which potentially limit the effects discussed. Some of the conclusions were that in a large number of…

This study extends some recently acquired knowledge about the development of visual imagery as an associative-learning strategy. Incorporating the present findings into the data already gathered, it appears that as a facilitator, sentence production precedes imagery generation since preoperational children benefit from instructions to engage in…

A number of "language" matters that students of English as a second language need to learn about are not treated in textbooks at all. Many of these are partly linguistic in nature and partly non-linguistic, involving other aspects of culture. One such matter is the cliche. For the native speaker of any language, a cliche is an expression…

Measures of oral language, verbal associative learning, and nonverbal IQ were collected from a mixed unilingual and bilingual random sample of 66 third- and fifth-grade pupils in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Correlational techniques were employed to determine whether, and to what extent, relationships existed between verbal associative learning skill…

A rationale was developed for researching reading comprehension based on information gain. Previous definitions of comprehension which were reviewed included operational vs. nonoperational and skills vs. processes. Comprehension was viewed as an informational processing event which includes a constellation of cognitive and learning processes. Two…

This paper reports on one study in a research program trying to extend existing findings on elaborative mediation in paired-associate learning into the domain of prose learning. Ten third graders and 22 fourth graders from an inner-city Catholic school served as subjects. A paraphrase recall pretest was administered which involved reading a…

This study evaluated the effects of individual differences in attitudes toward sex roles on the learning of neutral material associated with situations differing in rated sex-role appropriateness. It was hypothesized that if sexism is a valid dimension as measured in this study, then "sexists" would learn nonsense syllables associated with scenes…

This paper reports on three separate experiments conducted to examine the roles of particular task and subject characteristics in noun pair learning. In all three studies noun pairs were presented either in noun-verb-noun-conjunction-pronoun (NVNCP) or noun-conjunction-noun-verb-pronoun (NCNVP) contexts. In experiment 1, learning was assessed…

To study the effects of task and sample variation upon paired-associates (PA) performance, six third-grade and six sixth-grade classes in two urban schools were tested on two PA tasks, one pairing pictures of familiar objects (PA-CF), the other pairing nonsense syllables with Japanese "kanji" (PA-K). Hypotheses tested were: (1) Mean level of…

Twenty-four educable mentally retarded children (10 to 15 years old) were randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions (repetition-control, verbal context, and imagery) to determine the effects of elaboration on paired associate (PA) learning. Data from performances on two lists supported the hypothesis that elaboration in the form of…

Results pertaining to methodological aspects of an aptitude-treatment interaction study are presented. One treatment group in the study was given imagery instructions, the other had no imagery instructions. Each treatment group consisted of seven fifth-grade classes. Among the aptitude variables there were two versions of a paired-associates…

This study (N=160 males) examined the cognitive and behavioral effects of overt success feedback on subjects high and low in resultant achievement motivation (RAM). The cognitive effects of overt success feedback were investigated by requesting attributions to effort, ability, luck, and task difficulty concerning performance on a digit-symbol…

Two educable mentally retarded institutionalized adolescents were taught two classes of four symbols each through visual match-to-sample training in an investigation of transfer in paired associate learning. (Author/CL)

Presents research findings that support the use of mnemonic devices that improve spelling ability by linking the difficult part of a word to its correct spelling in a memory cue sentence. (RL)

Kindergarten children were administered a paired-associate learning task at the beginning and end of the school-year, under either regular (control) or self-generated visual imagery instructions. Age predicted performance in the imagery but not in the control condition. Results supported the developmental imagery hypothesis. (Author/RD)