Previous work shows that skilled college level readers tend to apprehend words as wholes, whereas they tend to process random strings of letters as a series of individual letters. Subjects in the study were forced to process words and non-word strings both serially and under conditions which allowed simultaneous processing, and their performances…

The purpose of this experiment was to determine whether a constant information processing rate would occur when subjects in verbal discrimination (VD) learning were presented a mixture of items of different lengths. Forty-two Naval Postgraduate School students served in a VD experiment with a random mixture of two-, three-, and four-word items at…

The meta-analysis method was used to summarize the findings of 23 studies of the word learning process that had used imagery as an independent variable as either an "imposed" or an "induced" condition. Imposed imagery investigations compared word recall on the basis of the imagery attribute of a word, while induced imagery…

A study tested the theory that an item that stands out from its background is better remembered than one that is similar to the background (the isolation effect). Specifically, the study examined whether the isolation effect would be greater when there was a larger and more confusing mass of background items, whether position of the isolated item…

Thirty-six undergraduate students participated in a two-hour experiment that measured the effect of fact and inference text annotation on the integration of information. The subjects were asked to read four pairs of meaningful stories, each of which contained four pairs of related facts about a mythical country. The texts of the experimental group…

Reports the results of a study of the effects of different types of recall expectation on the accuracy of making structural importance ratings of text ideas and on the recall of idea units by importance levels. (AEA)

This report describes a study of how maps are learned. Subjects (undergraduate students at the University of California) studied a simple map under various conditions and then answered questions about the map and drew the map from memory. It was found that local relations are learned before large-scale relations, that different types of map…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of adjunct objectives (AO) or adjunct rules (AR) on instructional materials. The subjects were 110 undergraduate volunteers attending Arizona State University. As each subject entered the lecture hall for the class, he was given an envelope containing the experimental materials appropriate to a…

Prompts in concept classification normally occur on the stimulus, while in memorization tasks prompts customarily are given on the response. Opposite results have been obtained for these two tasks with excessive prompting. This study used English-Russian word pairs to compare stimulus prompts (underlining the English word) with response prompts in…

This report describes four experiments on various aspects of memory for connected discourse. The first experiment dealt with preexperimental dispositions to respond to sentences and showed that people do come to experiments with biases; therefore, control of materials is necessary in this research area. The second experiment studied the…

To develop a coherent description of the knowledge and processes involved in skillful word recognition, a study was devised in which 16 adults participated in four related experiments. The purpose of the first experiment was to examine some basic aspects of the processing of words, pseudowords, and nonwords and to discover basic differences in…

Cued-recall and two-alternative, forced-choice recognition measures were used to evaluate subjects' retention of the specific wordings of studied texts. Results obtained after 10-minute and 24 hour retention intervals suggest that the studied wordings of texts are functional components of their memory representations. Theories that assume…

A framework for viewing human text comprehension, memory, and recall is presented that assumes patterns of abstract conceptual relations are used to guide processing. These patterns consist of clusters of knowledge that encode prototypical co-occurrences of situations and events in narrative texts. The patterns are assumed to be a part of a…

This report describes research on Bartlett's theory of constructive memory. In experiment one, schematic retention is related to Tulving's distinction between episodic and semantic memory. With the passage of time, memory for prose reflects decreasing output from episodic memory and increasing output from semantic memory. In experiment two,…

An experiment was conducted on 13 normal and 13 retarded readers, matched for age, IQ, and vocabulary. Recent findings suggested that reading retardates had difficulty in the cross-modal transfer of information from the auditory to the visual modality (e.g., converting auditory taps into visual dot patterns). Prior research by the present authors…