The primary purpose for conducting the present experiment was to assess the effects of an associative-attribute--for example, stimulus meaningfulness (m) on the learning rates of different age group children. An attempt was also made to assess the effects of age and m on a measure of subjective organization. This research consisted of two studies:…

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…

Twenty 3-year-old, home reared, Down's Syndrome children and eight 3-year-old normal children were studied to examine the verbal learning characteristics of Down's Syndrome children in typical preschool learning tasks. Prior to the study, research on characteristics of verbal learning deficits in retarded individuals and on verbal skill training…

This research evaluated the total-time hypothesis for the learning of connected discourse--that in verbal learning "a fixed amount of time is necessary to learn a fixed amount of material regardless of the number of individual trials into which that time is divided." Learning material consisted of two sets of connected discourse for each of the…

After opening with a 13-page review of the literature, the document's main emphasis is on the three experiments included in this report. The specific rationale, procedures, and results of the three studies comprise the major portion of the document. The general purpose of Experiment 1 was to ascertain the effects of prior relevant subject matter…

The purpose of the experiment was to test the prediction that non-specific facilitated learning of a second prose passage will occur in the situation where an initial passage read by the subjects contained concrete referents designed to increase the comprehension of a difficult to understand second passage. Two-hundred and forty subjects…

This study examines the relative effects of motivational orientation, ability, social class, sex, and instructions to employ verbal mediation on a paired-associates (PA) learning task. One hundred ninety-two seventh and eighth grade students were categorized according to degree of Intrinsic Task Motivation (IM), ability, and social class (SES).…

This paper summarizes data comparing the correlation patterns of psychometric, social, and demographic variables with intelligence quotient (IQ) and learning potential (LP) scores derived from the Kohs Block Designs and Raven Progressive Matrices procedures. The sample consists of educable mentally retarded special class and institutionalized…

A verbal concept-learning task permitting the externalizing and quantifying of learning behavior and 16 ability tests were administered to female graduate students. Data were analyzed by alpha factor analysis and incomplete image analysis. Six alpha factors and 12 image factors were extracted and orthogonally rotated. Four areas of cognitive…

Two experiments examined characteristics of text that determine when a repeated noun has a clearly identified referent. Verbs and article modifiers appeared to influence whether a noun is merely a repeated word in a text, or whether it is redundant at the propositional level. (SW)

It was hypothesized that if the episodic structure of a story determines subjects' organization of that story in memory, then variation in structure should affect the organization of information in recall. (Author/NCR)

A description of a series of six experiments dealing with human memory processes. They examined the types of codes generated in maintenance rehearsal and the effects of rehearsal time at various single levels of encoding. Data confirmed earlier findings and led to conclusions regarding repetition, encoding and levels of processing. (AMH)

Three experiments investigated whether abstract as well as concrete sentences can be processed in a holistic manner. Results suggest that the processing of both types of sentences involves construction of particularized, holistic mental representations that contain information and inferences based on context and knowledge of language and the…

Compared was the amount of verbal information processed visually by 19 elementary and secondary level deaf students, under print and fingerspelling conditions. (Author)

The relation between the amount of free study time needed to prepare for a perfect serial recitation and the number of words in the list was determined for individual subjects. List organization, controlled by experimenter or by subject, failed to affect difficulty. (CHK)