A set of experiments are reported in which it was found that most subjects were better at identifying both meaning and wording changes in concrete sentences and subjects took significantly longer to encode and decode the abstract sentences. Implications of these findings are discussed. (Author/RM)

Concludes that recall of a second item of a pair when cued with the first was significantly influenced by both pair relationship and the processing task. (RB)

Suggests that patterns of abilities are the best cross-cultural evidence for the effects of environment and culture upon memory development. An object and place recall task was administered to 5- and 7-year-old American and Guatemalan children. (Author/SDH)

One of a series of semiannual reports, this paper presents articles exploring the status and progress of studies on the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical research applications. Titles of the papers and their authors are as follows: (1) "Lexical Organization and Welsh Consonant Mutations" (S. Boyce, C. P.…

Ways in which elementary school teachers can encourage children's maintenance and generalization of memory strategies were investigated. Questions guiding the research were: Does the teacher (1) Repeat strategy suggestions frequently? (2) Give a rationale for strategy use or feedback concerning the effectiveness of the strategy? and (3) Attempt to…

This paper presents a process-structural model of the planning of drawings in childhood, and reports on seven experiments investigating children's ability to plan their drawings in advance. Three constructs are basic to the model: a figural scheme or schema, a spatial mental model, and a working memory called "M operator" or…

Recent research has demonstrated that spatial memory in young and elderly adults depends upon the context in which items to be remembered are placed. Contexts in which cues to location are distinctive and heterogeneous have been found to be associated with better object location memory for both age groups. In this study, the relative contributions…

In response to empirical evidence that suggests that children use more than one strategy in transitive inference tasks, an effort was made to model strategy development as it occurs under the dual constraints of a concept of order and task demands. In the model, when a task is presented, procedural memory is searched for a strategy that is…

In order to examine the differential availability of attention between the self-written text and standard text conditions, changes in error detection performance of unskilled hearing writers were compared with those of profoundly deaf writers. Subjects, 10 profoundly, pre-lingually deaf college freshmen with no additional handicaps and a…

Semantic priming is the process by which a subject performing a lexical decision task is prepared for a target word through the presentation of a semantically related word. Repetition of a given word at specific intervals is one form of priming that has been shown to reduce subject reaction time in word recognition tasks. A study was conducted to…

The ability of 20 deaf or hearing impaired high school students to demonstrate written recall of story propositions and correct story inferences from prose was examined and compared with 20 hearing students. Students were tested individually and were asked to read a story and then to rewrite it without looking at it. Premises in the recalled story…

Automatic memory processes were investigated in 10 mild and moderately retarded persons (21 years old) and in 10 chronological age-matched college level and 10 mental age-matched elementary grade control subjects through use of a frequency estimation task. This task required the subjects to view a series of slides, then estimate how many times…

Two experiments were conducted to test three hypotheses related to comprehension. The hypotheses were: that actions are harder to modify than states; that implications or inferences from modified concepts would also change in memory; and that propagation of modifications would be less likely to states than to actions. The first experiment tested…

Research is reviewed that centers on the development of young children's metamemoric ability and the relationship between such ability and memory performance. In addition, implications of the research for training and education are indicated. Components of Flavell and Wellman's (1977) definition of metamemory are used to organize the discussion.…

This paper reviews major stidues in metacognitive research relating to education and discusses their implications for educators and teacher education. Metacognition generally refers to self-awareness, or self knowledge of one's thought processes. Two types of research are discussed: (1) descriptive or correlational data on the natural development…