The role of motor activity in children's formation of dynamic mental imagery was investigated in two experiments using a paired-associate recognition task. From the recognition data, it was inferred that (2) the child's ability to form dynamic images relating two objects undergoes its most rapid development between the ages of five and eight; and…

To continue exploration of the educational problems of deprived children, 32 disadvantaged and 32 advantaged children ranging in age from 4 years, 8 months to 5 years, 8 months, were selected to take a battery of tests designed to measure some of the skills and characteristics thought to be related to academic success. The factors measured and the…

Kindergarten and first grade children were given a paired-associate learning task following one of five types of strategy-training procedures. In the motor training conditions, subjects generated interactions involving pairs of toys by playing with them or by drawing pictures of them. It was found that relative to simple imagery practice, motor…

Three studies were conducted to investigate the effects of extended syntactic elaboration conditions on paired-associate learning. Earlier studies have indicated that such conditions have facilitated paired-associate learning of retarded children. Study I involved 30 first grade children. As in previous studies, embedding stimuli to be associated…

Children's ability to produce and use natural language mediators on a paired-associate recall task requiring self-generated elaboration was analyzed. Elaborations were recorded and classified according to a semantic-syntactic scheme. Comparisons between grades were made to determine the effectiveness of elaboration categories in facilitating…

This study investigated developmental differences in the use of the common features abstraction strategy and the exemplar learning strategy for concept acquisition. Subjects were 30 second graders and 30 fifth graders. The concepts to be learned were two categories of artificial animals which differed on five dimensions. Each dimension had three…

This study investigates the role of labeling in developmental increases in picture recall. In two experiments, the memory for pictorial paired-associates of first graders or second graders, fourth graders and adults was evaluated by means of a study-test cued recall procedure. In Experiment 1, the stimulus presentation duration (on-time) and the…

Clarification of one aspect of Jensen's model of cognitive abilities provided the impetus for this study. Jensen found that sentence construction as a mediator facilitated learning of paired associates, except when kindergarteners were used as subjects. The purpose of the present study is to determine whether the failure of the mediators to…

This research contrasts the learning effects of an affective dimension of meaningfulness with the word-quality of consonant-vowel-consonant trigrams. Subject rated trigrams for both "association value"--having word-quality versus lacking word-quality--and "reinforcement value"--liking versus disliking the trigram regardless of word quality. Paired…