Previous research indicates that infants generalize syntactic-like structures to novel exemplars in a way that has been characterized as abstract and algebraic (Marcus et al., 1999). Infants appear to learn and generalize from speech more successfully than from nonspeech stimuli (Marcus, Fernandes, & Johnson, 2007). In this series of experiments,…

Wikis as shared digital artifacts may enable users to participate in processes of knowledge building. To what extent and with which quality knowledge building can take place is assumed to depend on the interrelation between people's prior knowledge and the information available in a wiki. In two experimental studies we examined the impact on…

Study supported by the Research and Development Center for Learning and Re-Education, University of Wisconsin, pursuant to contracts with the U.S. Office of Education.

Autonomously developing organisms face several challenges when learning reaching movements. First, motor control is learned unsupervised or self-supervised. Second, knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies is acquired in contexts in which action consequences unfold in time. Third, motor redundancies must be resolved. To solve all 3 of these…

In three experiments, subjects listened to a taped lecture on the topic of exposure meters for 35-mm cameras and were tested after one, two, or three presentations. Results suggest that repetition produces both a quantitative increase in amount learned and a qualitative change in the reader's processing strategy. (Author/LMO)

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether the results obtained by Knowles et al. were a result of varying levels of redundancy or varying levels of other task parameters. (Author)

Results confirm the observation that college students tend to select the more meaningful of two redundant-cue elements for completion of the associative stage of PA learning. (Authors)

The learning productivity approach to higher education attempts to gain productivity, not so much by reducing or cheapening inputs but by enhancing higher education's major output: student learning. In the learning productivity perspective, the principal problem is in teaching and learning inefficiencies such as excessive nonlearning time,…

Investigated 7-month olds' ability to relate vowel sounds with objects when intersensory redundancy was present versus absent. Found that infants detected a mismatch in the vowel-object pairs in the moving-synchronous condition but not in the still or moving-asynchronous condition, demonstrating that temporal synchrony between vocalizations and…

The effect of adding time for processing compressed speech and the effects of questions that gave adjunct pictures either a redundant or contextual function were investigated. Subjects were 144 fourth- and fifth-grade students randomly assigned to 24 groups. They listened individually to a 20-sentence story at either 225 or 300 words-per-minute…

Elaboration and overt rehearsal are compared as instructional paradigms for memory retention. Superior long-term retention was produced in the elaboration condition when the initial acquisition effects were statistically removed. Short-term data suggest acquisition was complexly affected by experimental condition, I.Q., and task. Elaboration…

Finds developmental differences in the abilities of eight-year-old, eleven-year-old, and adult second language learners to repeat certain grammatical sentence structures. (RL)

People behave as if they know the structure of their environment. Because people rarely study that structure explicitly, several theorists have postulated an implicit learning system that abstracts that structure automatically. An alternative view is that people respond to local structure that derives from global structure. Measures are developed…

Seven-month-old infants require redundant information such as temporal synchrony to learn arbitrary syllable-object relations. Infants learned the relations between spoken syllables, /a/ and /i/, and two moving objects only when temporal synchrony was present during habituation. Two experiments examined infants' memory for these relations. In…