Early and late formal-operational adolescents having similar ages and IQs were presented tasks to assess their use of organizational memory strategies: multitrial free recall of unrelated and categorized words and a sorting task followed by free recall of the sorted words. (Author/SS)

Kindergarten and first-grade children were told stories about twins who were given recognition and recall tasks and were asked to judge which twin remembered more of identical sets of items. Results showed that a number of the children gave clear evidence that they believed recognition tasks to be easier than recall tasks. (JMB)

Results of three studies suggest that, to notice inconsistencies in prose, children have to encode and store information, draw relevant inferences, retrieve and maintain inferred propositions in working memory, and compare them. Third through sixth graders do not spontaneously carry out those processes that they are capable of carrying out. (JMB)

Discusses the meaning of the term "literature," surveying various definitions, and concentrating on the elements of "style" and "message". (AM)

Differentiated are children with mental regress learning deficiency characterized by poor capacity to mentally reorder events and children with poor memory. (DB)

Investigates the differences between rehearsal span and memory span and evaluates the research of Dalrymple-Alford (1967) on the part of rehearsal on reinforcing memory traces. (Author/RK)

Children's comprehension and memory for different kinds of information in prose was assessed in two experiments. In the first experiment, 72 elementary school children listened to paragraphs and answered questions about explicit and implicit semantic relationships. The second experiment investigated the relationship between children's initial…

First, third, and fifth graders hid a series of "people pictures" in containers, half of which bore picture cues related to the people's societal roles and half of which bore cues unrelated to the people's roles. Aspects of their memory-for-location were then analyzed by grade level. (Author/JMB)

Subjects rated how certain they were that each of 60 statements was true or false. Embedded in the list was a set of statements that were either repeated across several sessions or were not repeated. Frequency of occurrence is apparently a criterion used to establish referential validity of plausible statements. (CHK)

Decisions about whether pairs of letter strings are both words or not are faster for semantically related words than unrelated words. Two experiments showed the semantic relatedness effect is greatly reduced when orthographically illegal, unpronounceable strings were used as negative items. Lexical decisions involve options on codes representing…

This study investigated developmental changes in the role of causality in perceiving and remembering events. Subjects were 99 children in kindergarden, third and sixth grades. (MS)

Learning and retention of procedural versus declarative memory tasks were examined with 26 young adults with mild mental retardation and 27 school children matched for mental age. The MR adults performed more poorly on both types of tasks, although learning rate and retention over time were comparable, thereby maintaining the control group's…

Investigated 4- to 6-year olds' creation and use of external representation strategies in problem solving. Found that direct training and increasing salience of task dimensions increased use of external representations. Four-year olds showed a utilization deficiency in external representation strategy use in the prompt conditions, but not in the…

A comparison of the Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test (B. Wilson, 1987) and the Wechsler Memory Scale--Revised conducted with 20 neurotoxin-exposed and 20 unexposed adults finds that the two tests do not differ significantly in their relationships to estimates of everyday memory, and using both tests does not improve prediction of memory function.…

The Wide Range Assessment of Memory and Learning (WRAML) (D. Sheslow and W. Adams, 1990) was given to 51 children. The General Memory Index (GMI) of the WRAML was compared with a short form of the WRAML, the Memory Screening Index (MSI). The MSI was higher than the GMI in 41 of 51 cases. (SLD)