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…

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…