Free recall of concrete and abstract words, following imaginal, associative, or anagram incidental learning tasks, was tested. Recall was significantly greater for concrete than abstract words, and recall for the imaginal task exceeded that of the associative task, which exceeded that of the anagram task. The interaction between kind of word and…

The effect of stimulus prefamiliarization on children's discrimination learning was investigated. Kindergartners were prefamiliarized with pictures which were identical, similar, or unrelated to pictures used in the learning task. Consistent with predictions derived from previous research, the learning of subjects who were prefamiliarized with…

A study of the commonality of associations of 50 lexical and 50 structural words by 80 kindergarten children indicated that (1) there was no significant difference in commonality of responses between lexical and structural words, (2) there was a difference in commonality relations for the sexes, and (3) there was more commonality in responses to…

Affect arousing and energizing properties of positive and negative reinforcing stimuli were investigated. Subjects received positive evaluations (PE), similar attitudes (SA), dissimilar attitudes (DA) or negative evaluations (NE) presented on slides. Pre- and post-slide semantic differentials were filled out by each subject. All subjects then…

This study investigated the effect of varying the time at which verbal directions are presented to students involved in a learning situation. Four randomly selected Biology 251 sections (309 students) were pretested on knowledge of symbiosis and found to be equivalent. The intact classes were then assigned at random to four treatments. Each class…

Previous studies of language have indicated that various qualifier words (e.g., I know that, probably) attached to statements represent differing degrees of belief in the statements. Nine qualifiers were studied which represent 3 degrees of probability and 3 forms of wording: "certainly, it is certain, I know, Probably, it is likely, I believe,…

The purpose of this study was to (1) compare the semantic relationships among common nouns obtained via two different measurement procedures and (2) determine if the use of these relationships to classify the various words results in differential degrees of learning when the stimuli are cast in terms of the paired-associate learning paradigm.…

Four experiments are reported investigating previous findings that speech perception interferes with concurrent verbal memory but difficult nonverbal perceptual tasks do not, to any great degree. (Editor)

Meyer found subjects were faster to determine if a stimulus word was a member of either of two prespecified categories if the categories were close in meaning. A reanalysis of the data favors instead a model emphasizing the role of decision-making processes in categorization and flexibility of task strategies. (CHK)

Analysis of the performance of second-, fourth-, sixth-grade, and college-level subjects on picture-word interference tasks indicated that distractor words belonging to the same semantic category as pictures produced more interference than either unrelated words or nonsense trigrams. (Author/JMB)

The study involving 20 retarded and 20 control children (all 10 to 13 years old) was conducted to determine the extent to which short-term memory of three-dimensional stimuli is dependent upon a verbal process for both normal and retarded children. (SBH)

Investigates (1) whether the semantic processing deficit in the aged can be attributed to age differences in attentional capacity usage during encoding and (2) age differences in terms of the interaction between encoding and retrieval operations. Subjects engaged in both primary (semantic, rhyme, arithmetic questions) and secondary…

Investigates hemispheric asymmetries in children for processing auditory material which varies in emotional intonation or verbal content. Children in kindergarten, fourth, and eighth grades reported on the emotional and verbal content of dichotically presented sentences. Findings indicate that the right hemisphere is specialized for mediating…

The present experiment was designed to distinquish between verbal and nonverbal encoding of sequentially presented spatial information. (Author)

Results of this experiment show that the lists composed of high-frequency words were more difficult to learn than lists composed of low-frequency words at all stages, but these lists were not differentially forgotten. (Editor)