The study investigates the effects of linguistic medium (English vs. Chinese), mode of stimulus presentation (visual vs. auditory), and noun frequency on short-term serial recall and serial learning. The results indicate that auditory input facilitates learning for American subjects but not for Taiwanese subjects, who learned somewhat faster with visual input. The findings support the general hypothesis that mode of input--especially with relatively unfamiliar material--may affect the meaningfulness of stimuli (as defined by associative value) for subjects who use ideographic rather than alphabetic symbols. The results are discussed with respect to implications for cross-cultural studies of persuasion as they might be influenced by verbal learning factors. (Author)