The aim of the present research was to determine whether the effect that phonological similarity has on immediate serial recall is influenced by the consistency and position of phonemes within words. In comparison to phonologically dissimilar lists, when the stimulus lists rhyme there is a facilitative effect on the recall of item information and…

Meyer found subjects were faster to determine if a stimulus word was a member of either of two prespecified categories if the categories were close in meaning. A reanalysis of the data favors instead a model emphasizing the role of decision-making processes in categorization and flexibility of task strategies. (CHK)

Semantic theory, its relationship to comprehension, the nature and function of semantic memory, and results of some research on semantic memory and bilinguals are discussed through a review of recent literature. The findings discussed seem to confirm these general observations regarding semantic memory and bilinguals: (1) there is integration and…

Thirty college undergraduates participated in a study of the effects of acoustic and visual interference on the recall of word and picture triads in both short-term and long-term memory. The subjects were presented 24 triads of monosyllabic nouns representing all of the possible combinations of presentation types: pictures, printed words, and…

Four experiments are reported in which relations of semantic distance to response latencies in similarity judgments, to reaction times in a same-different classification task, and to proximity of recall in a free recall task were investigated. (Author/RM)

Discusses three experiments designed to examine the problem of the internal representation of meaning of a verbal stimulus. (Text is in Italian.) (CFM)

The slower progress of semantic memory research is attributed to the difficulties involved in testing the relevant theories. This paper proposes a model for testing such theories using the Continuous Response (CR) task. The model establishes a link between the rate of recall and the semantic relationships among the category items. (JAZ)

The encoding specificity principle predicts that a change in context between input and test will adversely affect recognition memory. Experiment I tested this with sentences from a prose passage and no context effects were obtained. Experiments II, III, and IV compared context effects for words in random sentences versus connected discourse. In…

Fifth-grade learning disabled and skilled readers (N=32) were compared on verbal dichotic listening tasks for free recall and cued recall of word lists organized by semantic, phonemic, and structural features. Results indicated that disabled readers were comparable on free recall but were inferior to skilled readers on cued recall. (Author/JW)

This study indicates that the way in which stories are presented to children (verbal versus pictorial) makes little or no difference in the children's comprehension or recall of the stories. Ninety-six kindergarten and second grade children either looked at a series of pictures (and were told they formed a story) or listened to the story through a…

Age differences in recognition and recall of common nouns were studied using three groups of fifty students, with mean ages of 6.7, 11.4, and 16.9. Subjects were randomly placed in either an incidental or intentional learning condition. All subjects were questioned about the physical, phonemic, and semantic aspects of the same words, in the same…