Article describes experiment whereby it was established that with verbal-discrimination learning overt pronunciation facilitated a freer recall than covert pronunciation. (Author/MM)

Research supported by U.S. Office of Education contract OE-6-8934.

Verbal pretraining aided both single-problem discrimination and learning-set performance, while single-problem mastery manipulations had no significant effect. These results support the theory of acquired distinctiveness of cues. (MH)

Sixty college subjects were administered low frequency verbal discrimination lists under the conditions of pronouncing versus button pressing as a method of choice. There were sixteen word pairs in each list, and the words were three- and four-letter low frequency words selected from the Thorndike-Lorge tables. Four random orders of the pairs were…

Information theory was used to qualify the difficulty of verbal discrimination (VD) learning tasks and to measure VD performance. Words for VD items were selected with high background frequency and equal a priori probabilities of being selected as a first response. Three VD lists containing only 2-, 3-, or 4-word items were created and equated for…

A total of 90 undergraduate volunteers learned a 12-pair, low-frequency verbal discrimination list. Independent variables were feedback (positive only, negative only, or both) and initial success (17, 50, or 83 percent correct on the first trial). While the main effect of feedback was not significant, that of initial success was. (Author/RH)