Statistical learning allows us to discover myriad structures in our environment, which is saturated with information at many different levels--from items to categories. How do children learn different levels of information--about regularities that pertain to items and the categories they come from--and how does this differ from adults? Studies on…

Purpose: This study examined whether older adults remain perceptually flexible when presented with ambiguities in speech in the absence of lexically disambiguating information. We expected older adults to show less perceptual learning when top-down information was not available. We also investigated whether individual differences in executive…

This meta-analysis aimed to clarify the complex relationship between repetition and second language (L2) incidental vocabulary learning by meta-analyzing primary studies reporting correlation coefficients between the number of encounters and vocabulary learning. We synthesized and quantitatively analyzed 45 effect sizes from 26 studies (N = 1,918)…

This study aimed at investigating the ability to learn regularities across the life span and examine whether this learning process can be supported or hampered by verbalizations. For this purpose, children (aged 8-10 years) and younger (aged 19-30 years) and older (aged 70-80 years) adults took part in a sequence learning experiment. We found that…

The researchers completed a corpus-driven analysis of 688 texts written for children, language learners, and older readers to determine the vocabulary size necessary for comprehension and the potential to incidentally learn vocabulary through reading each text type. The comparison between texts written for different audiences may indicate their…

This study aimed to determine the degree of metaphorical meaning acquisition reflected in the ratings of Mental Lexicon Organizations (MLOs) namely subordinate, compound and coordinate; and to explore the interaction effects of the self-regulating capacities and age on the ratings. The method is quantitative. 261 out of 1,278 students of English,…

Research has suggested that memory performance may be related to the extent of stimulus processing during acquisition. To examine processing efficiency and processing deficiency differences between younger and older adults, four studies were conducted. In the first study, young and old adults rated word lists, manipulated for generation specific…

The incidental memory of young children was tested for words or words plus pictures that were initially presented under orienting conditions. These conditions required responses to acoustic or semantic qualities of the stimuli and an affirmative or negative response to the orienting questions. (PCB)

Three experiments with 164 individuals between 4 and 80 years old examined age-related changes in explicit memory for three perceptual features: item identity, color, and location. Findings indicated that performance on explicit memory tests was not a consistent inverted U-shaped function of age across various features, but depended on the…

Performance on tasks of memory and of attention was consistently interrelated for nonlearning disabled children and less consistently so for learning disabled subjects. Hyperactivity was also related to poorer performance on the cognitive measures. (Author/DB)

Strategies of allocating attention to information and incidental learning task performance were assessed among 60 children from grades 2, 5, and 8. Children's predictions about their recall of incidental objects and answers to a posttest questionnaire provided verbal measures of their understanding of attention. (Author/RH)

Among elementary, junior high, and college students, intelligent retrieval methods for recalling 20 letters of the alphabet consisted either of mentally proceeding through the alphabet from the onset and writing down each previously written letter as encountered and recognized, or else first rote recalling some letters and then switching to the…

The incidental learning paradigm supports two findings concerning selective attention: (1) the difference between central and incidental task performance increases with age, and (2) the correlation between central and incidental performance decreases with age. Neither of these findings clearly supports the view that attentional selectivity…

Tests second- and sixth-grade students' incidental memory for words under acoustic- and semantic-processing conditions. The findings were predicted by an associative-processing account of incidental memory previously advanced by Ghatala (1981) and indicate that both knowledge-base development and processing activity determine children's incidental…

Memory of incidentally learned material was investigated across three developmental levels in immediate and delay conditions. Incidental learning increased with age with or without specific instructions, suggesting that previously reported divergent developmental trends may not be the result of the type of paradigm. (Author.PN)