THE VERBAL ORGANIZATION RELEVANT TO SERIAL LEARNING WAS STUDIED. NINETY-SIX FOURTH AND FIFTH GRADERS WERE REQUIRED TO LEARN THE ORDER OF ONE LIST OF 14 FAMILIAR NOUNS. THE CONDITIONS OF THE SERIAL TASK WERE PHRASE CONTROL, SENTENCE CONTROL, AND NOUN CONTROL. THE DEPENDENT VARIABLE WAS THE NUMBER OF CORRECT RESPONSES. A REPEATED MEASURES ANALYSIS…

The solution of relational size problems was facilitated when children were told to find the smallest member of the series. Children who could not do so could not solve the problem. (ST)

Purpose of this study was to ascertain the efficiency of the first letter mnemonic as a memorization strategy. (Authors)

It was concluded that the retrieval of information from immediate memory is dependent upon the degree of rehearsal of presented information. (Author)

Examined seriation, conservation, and theory of mind abilities in 16 adolescents and adults with autism, in 16 adolescents and adults with mental retardation, and in 16 normally developing children. Found that participants with autism performed better than participants with mental retardation on seriation, while no differences emerged between…

Examined effects of training in sequencing pairs of visual stimuli on subsequent six-stimuli or five overlapping two-stimuli sequencing. Subjects were 3- and 4-year-olds. Found that few succeeded with untrained two- and six-stimulus sequences derivable from the two-stimulus training, but when given training on only the overlapping sequences,…

This study of sequential memory in 16 children with language impairment found that list-final suffix effect was substantially larger than in control children, even though other aspects of their recall were normal. Children with language impairment were more dependent upon unanalyzed acoustic and phonetic representations of speech. Response…

Knowledge concerning domain-specific regularities in sequential structure has long been known to affect recall for serial order. However, very little work has been done toward specifying the exact role such knowledge plays. The present article proposes a theory of serial recall in structured domains, based on Bayesian decision theory and a set of…

S.G. Little (1997) reported the top contributors to the school psychology literature from 1987 to 1995. The present study represents a follow-up by examining the top contributors from 1996 to 2005. Similar to Little, a list of the top 50 contributors was developed using a point system that assigned more credit based on fewer coauthors and higher…

Recent experiments have shown that placing dissimilar items on lists of phonologically similar items enhances accuracy of ordered recall of the dissimilar items [Farrell, S., & Lewandowsky, S. (2003). Dissimilar items benefit from phonological similarity in serial recall. "Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition," 29,…

We report two experiments examining the role of concreteness and word phonological neighborhood characteristics on immediate serial recall. In line with previous findings concreteness, word frequency, and larger neighborhood size are associated with better serial recall. Both concreteness and word neighborhood size were also positively associated…

Simulation and real data studies are used to investigate the value of modeling multiple-choice distractors on item response theory linking. Using the characteristic curve linking procedure for Bock's (1972) nominal response model presented by Kim and Hanson (2002), all-category linking (i.e., a linking based on all category characteristic curves…

An item that stands out (is isolated) from its context is better remembered than an item consistent with the context. This isolation effect cannot be accounted for by increased attention, because it occurs when the isolated item is presented as the first item, or by impoverished memory of nonisolated items, because the isolated item is better…

Background: Velo-cardio-facial syndrome (VCFS, 22q 11.2 deletion) is characterized by severely delayed language development. The current study explored the integrity of verbal short-term memory (STM), a cognitive function critically involved in language development, in eight children with VCFS. Methods: Using a multiple case study design, we…

This paper describes a computer model that simulates the way children develop the reasoning skills of transitive inference and the construction of ordered sets. The computer model begins from general operations, such as setting and removing goals, storing and retrieving information, comparing elements to find matches, reading premises, and giving…