Categories are fundamental to everyday life and the ability to learn new categories is relevant across the lifespan. Categories are ubiquitous across modalities, supporting complex processes such as object recognition and speech perception. Prior work has proposed that different categories may engage learning systems with unique developmental…

Humans are capable of extracting recurring patterns from their environment via statistical learning (SL), an ability thought to play an important role in language learning and learning more generally. While much work has examined statistical learning in infants and adults, less work has looked at the developmental trajectory of SL during childhood…

This study explored the causes of the reverse modality effect when learning from multimedia instruction. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups (visual text or spoken text). The findings revealed a reverse modality effect wherein that those studying visual text outperformed those studying spoken text on three assessments. Further…

To determine the efficacy of auditory, visual and combined auditory-visual modes of presenting verbal material, 12 first-grade, 12 third-grade and 12 fifth-grade children were tested on paired associates lists presented under visual, auditory and combined auditory-visual conditions. Pictures rather than printed words were used as visual stimuli to…

Reports three experiments investigating the relationship of the suffix effect and echoic memory. Shows that echoic memory persists for at least 20 seconds. Illustrates that echoic memory can be used to establish a more effective nonechoic memory. Shows that recency recall is higher to auditory than to visual items. (PMJ)