Results of a word association task administered to second and sixth grade children and adults suggest that whether the word association response is of the same or different form as the stimulus word is related to the word-count frequency of the stimulus and the participants age. (Author/KM)

Data based on the single word responses children made to visually presented alphabet letter stimuli were examined and compared with earlier adult studies. One hundred and eighty sixth-grade students from two elementary schools participated in the study. The subjects responded by writing the first word they thought of beginning with the letter…

Conclusions from five experiments were: that the frequency of implicit associational responses has minimal effect on verbal-discrimination and two-category classification learning; and that the intrapair associations which do develop in verbal-discrimination learning are not critically involved in the making of those discriminations. (Authors/CB)