Twenty four educable retarded males (eight gainers, eight non-gainers, and eight high scorers) were given an 18-item picture paired-associates task. Results showed that gainers learned more slowly than high scorers but the two groups together did not differ from nongainers. The following two interpretations were offered. With a minimal memory…

The effects of five elaboration conditions on the paired associate learning of 50 educable mentally retarded children (mean age 9 years) were investigated. Four of the conditions were included in a two factor design (type of relation x familiarity); the fifth (nonsense condition) was included as an outside control. Ten children were tested in each…

Compared were the performances of 45 normal and 45 slow learners (all in junior high school) on a task of original and relearning of paired associate responses as a result of induced success or failure following each response. Ss were asked to pair stick figures with consonant trigrams and then told their performance was either correct or wrong…

Based, in part, on a PhD Dissertation at the University of Oregon under Melton C. Martinson. (RJ)

To investigate organizational strategies of educable mentally retarded (EMR) and normal boys, the performance of 30 normal boys (mean IQ 105.1) and 30 EMR boys (mean IQ 69.9), ages 7-12 years, was compared on various free recall learning tasks. Three measures of input organization employed were category clustering, associative clustering, and…

Two studies investigated characteristics of verbal elaborations (length and number of relations provided by the syntactic construction) to determine what makes them effective mediators for young children. Study I treated the role of an elaboration's length in facilitating paired associate learning in 22 nursery school children. Data indicated that…