The purpose of this experiment was to determine whether a constant information processing rate would occur when subjects in verbal discrimination (VD) learning were presented a mixture of items of different lengths. Forty-two Naval Postgraduate School students served in a VD experiment with a random mixture of two-, three-, and four-word items at…

Provides further evidence of the psychological importance of semantic roles for verbal learning and broadens the realm of earlier work with semantic roles by using connected prose rather than individual sentences. (HOD)

THE PROBLEM WAS TO DETERMINE WHICH COMBINATIONS OF VERBAL AND GRAPHIC MATERIALS LEAD TO THE MOST EFFICIENT LEARNING. NINETY-ONE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE STUDENTS WERE DIVIDED INTO EIGHT GROUPS WHICH READ THE SAME INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIAL (ON ELECTRICAL CIRCUITRY) IN VERBAL, GRAPHIC, VERBAL-GRAPHIC, OR GRAPHIC-VERBAL FORM. HALF OF THE SUBJECTS WERE…

Describes four experiments of conditions under which irregular spelling or pronunciation influence two reading tasks--naming and lexical decision. Concludes that such irregularities only influence the reading of lower frequency words and that recognition of a large class of higher frequency words is insensitive to irregularities of spelling or…

Listeners shadowed lists of words or parts of sentences, and shadowing latencies were recorded. The effect of attended context was interpreted as a result of strategical manipulation of response bias (a resource-limited process), whereas unattended context may be effective through spreading excitation in semantic memory (a data-limited process).…

A variable time delay naming latency paradigm was used to investigate the processing of noun-verb lexical ambiguities (e.g., "watch") in syntactic contexts that biased either the noun or the verb reading. Results support a two-stage model in which all reading of ambiguous words are initially accessed, followed by suppression of…

This study was concerned with the effect of situational frequency manipulations on subsequent discrimination learning. The subjects were 104 fourth-grade children attending two elementary schools located in middle-class residential areas. Twenty-six subjects were randomly assigned to each of two picture conditions. The other 52 subjects were…

This study investigated the use readers make of visual and verbal illustration to understand and remember what they have read. Specific focus was placed on readers' use of pictures and analogies to understand and remember written directions for a spatial manipulation task. The independent variables measured were type of text, mode of illustration,…

Research into the effectiveness of various approaches to reading instruction, while it has dealt with several which are promising, has been unsuccessful in establishing any one as superior. Therefore, one especially important aspect of future research should be an examination of meaningfulness and its effect on children's verbal learning. This…

This study tested the following hypotheses: (1) that children would use both verbal-associative and acoustic memory attributes when encoding words in memory, and that the recall of younger children would indicate dominance of the acoustic attribute while the recall of older children would indicate dominance of the verbal-associative attribute; (2)…

Two experiments were conducted to test how readers process unattended words in a display and how the semantic category of these flanking words affects response time. (Author/AM)

This research project investigated some of the characteristics of primary and secondary memory. In the primary research, subjects were given a list of words followed by an interpolated task. The data of interest were the recall for terminal items in the list. Using this procedure, the researchers have demonstrated negative recency in initial…

This paper, presented at the 1973 meeting of the American Education Research Association, discusses some of the studies conducted in the area of learning from prose. The first study dealt with pooling independent sentences into groups of related sentences and preparing passages by stringing these sentences together. College students then read one…

The effect of supplementary questions on learning from textual materials was investigated in a sample of 94 college juniors. Each subject was given a 1,500-word passage describing the concept of measurement. One treatment group was asked to identify characteristics of the concept; another was asked to identify examples from the text; a third…