Visual-verbal paired-associate learning (PAL) is thought to be related to reading acquisition and, more specifically, to word reading skills. To date, the uniqueness and strength of this relationship has remained unclear because most studies have been conducted in opaque orthographies such as English, and few studies have controlled for all of the…

A total of 336 second, fourth, and sixth graders were tested to determine whether the older children automatically attached verbal labels to pictures during paired-associate learning. The author questions whether such labeling necessarily facilitates item learning or associative learning. (JMB)

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)

In a combined verbal and motor paired-associate task, children in kindergarten, second grade, and fourth grade learned nonsense names and spatial responses for three random shapes. Results showed evidence for mediation at all three age levels and increased mediational effects with age. (Author/JMB)

Syntactical mediation refers to the phenomenson in which the grammatical structure of language can be employed in the structure of verbal mediators. (Authors/MB)

Assesses the relative importance of synonymity and antonymity for memory encoding of words for second and sixth graders. Also, the variable of association strength is investigated for both groups through the presentation of false-recognition stimuli. (DP)

The role of meaning in the learning of verbally presented paired associates (PAs) is described by means of an experiment with a replication. A printed PA list containing six different types of items was presented to Sixth Graders. Four of the item types consisted of sentence-embedded PAs on the study trials, followed by test trial cues varying in…

This study was designed to investigate the functional similarity of the mental processes children use to learn verbal tasks and pictorial tasks. Children in grades 3 and 6 (n=144) and in grade 9 (n=112) were given four short paired-associate tasks entitled Pictures, Concrete Words, Abstract Words, and Japanese Characters. The tasks consisted of…

The facilitation observed when paired-associates (PA) are presented or generated in a meaningful string is a phenomenon that is well-documented, and raises a number of developmental issues. The principal objective of the current research was to examine the relationship between performance on an auditory PA task and the linguistic components of…