In free recall learning, taxonomic organization has been studied almost to the exclusion of alternative types of organization. Consequently, little is known about how learning and memory are affected by alternative types of organizations. The present experiments explored the differential effects of two kinds of organization on free recall…

Students in grades 4, 6, and 8 were required to indicate whether or not a stimulus word belonged in either of two semantic categories that were held in memory. Results indicated that even for the youngest children semantically similar categories required less search time than dissimilar categories. (GO)

This study was designed to contrast children's recall clustering before and after they acquired stable input organizations. A sample of 120 subjects (24 from preschool grades, 1, 4, 7, and college) performed two successively presented, procedurally identical, series of recall-sort-recall tasks. (Author/JMB)

Ten experiments examined the effect on the performance of 265 nursery schoolers through first graders using collection versus class terms to describe sets of familiar objects. No facilitative effect of collection terms occurred on number tasks; in a class-inclusion task, performance was better with collection than class terms. (SLD)

Variations in sorts of rural Mexican-Spanish "have" verbs were analyzed using two approaches: one which measures subject differences from a standard categorization, and another which directly compares pairs of individual subject's sorts. "The second approach revealed a consistent structure for a subset of the subjects not revealed…

This research studied the effects of instructions on children's recall in a free recall learning task. Also investigated were developmental trends, including expected superiority of older children in recall and spontaneous formation of stable organizational groupings. A third area of study concerned the possibility that younger children benefit…