In two experiments, differences were investigated between 21 gifted youths and comparison groups on paired-associate tasks involving meaningful and nonmeaningful words, reported use of spontaneously produced learning strategies, and degree to which learning strategies facilitated recall. Gifted youths outperformed age peers in recall and strategy…

Reported were two studies designed to clarify the effects of verbal elaboration on children's learning. Study I was undertaken to replicate, with controlled training times, an earlier investigation of the effects of three types of extended verbal elaboration (sentences, semantic paragraphs, and syntactic paragraphs). Trials to criterion analyses…

Twenty learning disabled (LD) students (9-12 years) with normal verbal IQs performed better on elaborated paired associate learning tasks than 20 LD Ss (10-12 years) with lower verbal IQs. (CL)

In a combined verbal and motor paired-associate task, children in kindergarten, second grade, and fourth grade learned nonsense names and spatial responses for three random shapes. Results showed evidence for mediation at all three age levels and increased mediational effects with age. (Author/JMB)

Syntactical mediation refers to the phenomenson in which the grammatical structure of language can be employed in the structure of verbal mediators. (Authors/MB)

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…

Seven mediational strategies for use in verbal associative learning have been discovered. They range from the simple to the intermediate to the complex. The subjects of this study were 173 fifth graders, who were administered a paired-associate (PA) task and asked to identify the strategies they used. On the basis of this data, they were then…

Presents a series of these experiments which examined cue function in trigram verbal discrimination learning by retarded subjects. The two variables of chief interest were: (1) trigram meaningfulness, and (2) reinforcement history. (Author/LLK)

The effects of three types of pretraining in the use of syntactical verbal mediators on subsequent paired-associate performance were investigated. Subjects were 40 Negro and 40 white first graders randomly assigned to one of four groups. Condition 1 consisted of pretraining in both "mediation" instruction (experimenter gave subjects a sentence…

The effects of two types of elaboration training (imagery and sentence generation) on the paired associate learning of 32 educable mentally retarded children (aged 9 to 13 years were compared over two levels of verbalization (none and overt). Each S was first tested on a warmup list, then trained to generate elaborations, and finally given two…

The relative effectiveness of three types of elaboration (sentences, semantic paragraphs, and syntactic paragraphs) on paired associate learning in 75 educable mentally retarded Ss was tested under list lengths of eight, 12, 16 and 24 pairs. For all lists except the eight pair list, the elaborators were found to be equally and highly effective as…