The present study was designed to explore what subjects can and will do spontaneously in memory retrieval situations. Subjects were kindergarten, third grade and college students. (SB)

A group of 73 normal children (ages 8 to 10) was compared to 49 age-matched developmentally dyslexic children of average intelligence on the California Verbal Learning Test for Children (CVLT-C), to determine if reading disability was associated with impaired verbal memory. Dyslexics differed significantly from controls on 9 of the 12 CVLT-C…

Describes three experiments which investigated memory for items and order in a progressive elaboration paired-associates task. Subjects were kindergarteners, second and fourth graders. Experiments I and II indicated an age effect on order retention which was overcome through instruction in Experiment III. (JMB)

This experiment (involving kindergarteners and fourth graders) examined the development of the ability to encode, store, and retrieve verbally-or visually-presented material when the modality of the test stimulus was varied. (JMB)

Twenty learning disabled (LD) students (9-12 years) with normal verbal IQs performed better on elaborated paired associate learning tasks than 20 LD Ss (10-12 years) with lower verbal IQs. (CL)

The mnemonic consequences of semantic, acoustic, and orthographic encoding and the relationships between encoding and retrieval cues were investigated in an incidental-learning experiment involving 24 first-, third-, and fifth-grade pupils. Each child was asked one orienting question for each of 18 words; the questions differed in the type of…

Children in kindergarten, third grade, and fifth grade were presented a list of either pictures or words (with items presented varying numbers of times on the study trail). In both picture and word conditions, half of the subjects estimated how many times each item had been presented (absolute judgments) and the other half judged which of two…

Eight experiments are described in this report. In experiment 1, four and five year olds were presented four verbal discrimination (VD) lists. For three of the lists all correct items were either conceptually, acoustically, or affectively similar. The fourth was a control list. The conceptual list facilitated VD learning. Experiment 2 indicated…

Ninety children in third and fourth grade were assessed on a hierarchical class inclusion task. Scores were trichotomized, and children from each level were randomly assigned to one of three cueing conditions (no cues, two superordinate cues, six subordinate cues). Subjects were administered a recall task of categorized words and "new" words…

The false recognition procedure was used to determine the relative dominance of visual and verbal memory organization at two grade levels. The results indicated that visual encoding was predominant for first graders, but that both visual and verbal encoding occurred with fourth graders. (MS)

This study examined the effects of socio-economic status (SES) and categories of learning when holding ethnicity constant. Seventy-two subjects were randomly selected from two socioeconomic levels; 36 each from middle and low socioeconomic status. Fourth and fifth grade children were used. Three hypotheses were tested: (1) positive correlations…

Thirty-seven second, 41 fourth, and 46 sixth graders were tested on low-level subcomponents of reading efficiency and high-level text comprehension to assess the relationship between the two parameters. High-level comprehension does not depend on efficiency of lexical access processes, but verbal memory span is important in high-level…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether children as young as second-graders could encode categorically within an abstract evaluative dimension. The study uses mode of stimulus presentation (auditory or visual) as an independent variable. The subjects were 40 white middle class children from grades 2, 4, and 6, who were randomly assigned…

This paper reviews studies on cognitive processes that may mediate the development of early learning problems. Topics covered include auditory and visual discrimination deficits, integration of information from different modalities, the significance of attentional factors, contributions of memory factors, and the importance of cognitive style…