Briefly reviewed is research on paired-associate learning in which subjects usually are retardates. Paired-associate learning is said to involve mediation of associations for numbers, letters, grouping of numbers or letters, or other groups such as words. It is explained that retardates have been used as subjects in research on paired-associate…

Thirty-six normal 5-year-olds and 60 educable mentally retarded (EMR) students with a mean age of 7 years were tested to determine whether specific formats of interrogatives would be instrumental in inducing the generation of effective verbal mediators. Ten EMR Ss and 6 normal Ss were tested on 21 paired associates in each six experimental…

The effects of five verbal elaboration conditions on the paired associate learning of 50 elementary-aged educable mentally retarded children were investigated. Four of the conditions, crossing functional and positional relations in familiar or unfamiliar events, were included in a two-factor design (type of relation x familiarity); the fifth…

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)

To investigate organizational strategies of educable mentally retarded (EMR) and normal boys, the performance of 30 normal boys (mean IQ 105.1) and 30 EMR boys (mean IQ 69.9), ages 7-12 years, was compared on various free recall learning tasks. Three measures of input organization employed were category clustering, associative clustering, and…

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…

Twenty-four educable mentally retarded children (10 to 15 years old) were randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions (repetition-control, verbal context, and imagery) to determine the effects of elaboration on paired associate (PA) learning. Data from performances on two lists supported the hypothesis that elaboration in the form of…

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…

Educable mentally retarded students were taught a verbal mediation learning strategy to determine if their performance pattern would correspond to learning potential designations derived with nonverbal materials. In comparisons of regular and special class groups using a picture paired-associates learning task, special class high-scorers performed…