Examines hypothesis that lack of structural constraint limits children's ability to use context and category cues to search associative memory for episodic information. Second- and fifth-graders and college adults were shown word triplets and asked to recall the final target member of each triplet in a cued recall task. (Author/BE)

The goal of this study was to determine some of the factors that contribute to developmental differences children and adults display when they use cues to retrieve specific memories. (PCB)

In a visual memory task, two degrees of stimulus detail were compared to test Reese's hypothesis that stimulus detail would facilitate retention of paired associates for young children. Forty 4-year-olds and forty 5-year-olds were tested to assess reported trend that elaboration facilitates retention for older children. (JH)

Kindergarten children (N=60 boys and girls) were presented with a paired-associate memory task in which the pairs were elaborated by either a normal interaction (e.g., The horse eats the apple.) or a bizarre interaction (e.g., The horse peels the apple.) in order to test the assumption that bizarreness is a necessary factor in a mnemonic system.…

Examined young children's interpretations of the meanings of indirect speech acts (e.g. it's 10 o'clock) in paragraphs of a contextual type biasing a literal interpretation (time of day) or an extraliteral interpretation (time to prepare for bed). Memory for these meanings was also assessed. (Author/JMB)

Six experiments examined the problems third graders, sixth graders, and college students had in gaining access to episodic information while retrieving information from memory. Results suggested that conceptual access problems vary with grade and that elaboration of the representation of an episode facilitates access. (Author/SKC)

Five experiments investigated whether the cued recall of children and adults differed for classified events featuring different category and relation types. Recall for events differed strongly for children and adults. Differences were attributed to properties of the internal structure of event representation in memory. (SKC)

Used four experiments to examine retrieval access and item-by-item search processes and strategies in the cued recall of children in grades 3 and 6, and of adults. Results suggested that retrieval access is a problem for young children and contributes strongly to developmental increases in recall. Adults used retrieval strategies, although search…

Four experiments examined the contribution of item-by-item retrieval search processes to developmental differences in cued recall. Results indicated that developmental cued recall differences remained even when access, constraint, search object, and knowledge base problems were controlled or minimized. (SKC)

This experiment assessed interactions between encoding and retrieval strategies in recall. Three levels of encoding conditions (random, blocked,sort) and three types of retrieval conditions (free, cued, constrained) were examined at three age levels (6, 10, and 18 years). (CM)

Describes four experiments that examined the ability of second- and fifth-grade children and college adults to use "extra-list" cues to retrieve episodic information from memory. Shows that effective cue use varied with both the "match" of cue and event classification, and with the associative structure of permanent memory.…

Examines whether young children and adults are able to interpret sarcastic utterances and whether placements of contextual information before or after the utterance differentially affect interpretation. Results obtained from first and third graders and from college students indicated that different placements of contextual information do affect…

Five experiments were used to determine whether and why second graders, fourth graders, and college students differ in modifying causal inferences about a surprising event in a story. Illustrated how encoding and retrieval factors contribute to inference modification. Results showed small developmental increases in inference modification in…

Developmental differences in the relative salience of features in concept representations in semantic memory and their contributions to differences in cued recall were examined in two experiments. Subjects were second graders, fifth graders, and college students. Results showed that recall varied with feature salience, with salience greatest for…

Provides direct evidence of developmental differences in the processing of item-specific information, discussing how these differences affect recognition as well as recall performance in second graders, fifth graders, and college adults. Results suggest that retention varies as a result of the degree to which children differ from adults in…