The purpose of this study was to determine: (1) the effects of repeating words in compound sentences; and (2) the differences in encoding processes in short term memory for natural language materials compared with nonlinguistic material. A series of give experiments was administered to first graders, college students, and older subjects. The…

The relationship between visual recognition memory and performance on a paired-associate task for good and poor readers was investigated. Subjects were three groups of 21, 21, and 22 children each, with mean IQ's of 98.2, 108.1, and 118.0, respectively. Three experimental tasks, individually administered to each subject, measured visual…

The present study explores accuracy and speed of responses by the five-year-old child to expanded and conjoined sentences. The following factors were considered: (a) number of transformations, (b) types of transformations, (c) auxiliary-type sentence expansion and (d) type of query (those designed to elicit responses which should reflect…

Experiments in the Psychology Department of George Washington University suggest the possibility of constructing sub-languages of English which can accelerate communication. "Quickspeak," a restricted redundancy language, eliminates from natural language those linguistic cues which are reconstructable from those that remain. Principles…

The purpose of this research project was to evaluate the effects of prompts and cues in paired-associate learning. Experiment One was to investigate the effects of cues and prompting on the learning of Japanese vocabulary. Experiment Two duplicated the above using digit-nonsense syllable combinations as the paired associates. The next three…

A comparison was made of short- and long-term visual and auditory memory in relation to visual and auditory interference. The questions investigated were: (1) will interference be greater when it occurs in the same modality (auditory or visual) in which it was learned (i.e., similarity hypothesis), or (2) will interference be greater when it…

The experiments described in this report attempt to further understanding of the storage and retrieval of factual information. In the first five experiments, organization of simple prose materials is varied. Effects upon both accuracy and order of recall are discussed in terms of retrieval strategies determined by organization. The fourth and…

The viability of visual imagery as a prose-learning process was evaluated in two experiments with elementary school children in this study. In experiment one, two concrete ten-sentence passages were constructed. The attributes of two subclasses were contrasted in each passage (two kinds of monkeys in one passage, and two kinds of cars in the…

Previous research has found that spoken rehearsal is superior to silent rehearsal during verbal discrimination learning. The frequency theory posits that verbal discrimination (VD) learning improves as the frequency differential between the correct and incorrect member of each pair increases. Erlebacher, Hill, and Wallace (1967) tested this…

In an attempt to ascertain the facilitating functions of audiovisual between-channel redundancy in information processing, a series of audiovisual experiments alternating auditory and visual as the dominant and redundant channels were conducted. As predicted, results generally supported the between-channel redundancy when input (stimulus) was…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of adjunct aids in the form of questions on ninth graders' comprehension of 3,500-word passages. Specifically, the study focused on the effect on literal comprehension of content and process stimulus questions written at the cognitive levels of memory and evaluation when positioned before and…

This paper reports on two experiments conducted in an attempt to extend findings by Ellis which suggest a rehearsal deficit in mentally retarded subjects. In experiment one, mentally retarded subjects saw nine stimuli in a serial position probe task for either two, four, or six seconds each. Performances for the two and four second-per-item rates…

The Wisconsin model of conceptual learning and development specifies four levels of mastery in the acquisition of a concept. The levels of mastery are defined in terms of performance on tasks designed to measure each level. This paper discusses the internal operations or processes which are inferred as the mechanisms by which each level of…

In two experiments a total of 662 high school students read a prose passage, took a verbatim or paraphrase quiz, and a week later completed a verbatim or paraphrase delayed test. Taking a quiz significantly enhanced performance on the delayed test. Performance was consistently much higher on the verbatim than on the paraphrase forms of quizzes and…

This paper identifies and describes three distinct variables on which prose passages can differ, from a linguistic point of view. Each of these variables relates to the way in which the content of prose is organized to convey meaning to the reader. The first variable is the position of information in a structure representing a passage's…