In addition to the important role of memory strategies in mediating age changes in recall performance, it is clear that the permanent memory system (or information available in the knowledge base) exerts a significant influence on the acquisition and retention of information. Age changes in memory performance will be fully understood only through…

Four presentations in two recall conditions (immediate and one-week delay) were used to investigate the combined effects of imagery and semantic organizational strategies on the free recall of 80 college undergraduates. Both imaginal and semantic organization were comparably manipulated presenting each response noun simultaneously with an imagery…

A battery of memory tests was administered to 243 male university students. Factor analysis with oblique rotation of factors revealed five factors: (1) associative memory (particularly important in paired-associate tests), (2) short-term visual memory (the ability to derive information from briefly presented visual displays), (3) meaningful memory…

This paper is a summary of research on the perceptual and memory processes related to reading, their developmental progress in children, and the reading abilities in adults. Reported among the results of the various studies are the following: (1) developmental changes in reading after second grade primarily improve speed of coding, (2) reading…

In order to determine whether there are developmental differences in the handling of the modality attribute 32 children from each of grades two and six and 32 college students were presented with a video-taped mixed-modality list of 32 first grade words. Subjects were asked to recall the words, to identify the presentation modality of each word on…

The impact of age effects on nonverbal memory for auditory or tactual patterns has been largely neglected in research studies. The effects of age on nonverbal memory were investigated by comparing subjects (N=120), divided by age decades into six groups (N=20), through tests using visual, auditory, and tactual items which were resistant to verbal…

Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) is a theory that predicts how units of information should be distributed in a sentence and how sentences should be related in a discourse. A binary topic-comment structure is assigned to each FSP sentence. For most English sentences, the topic is associated with the subject or the left-most noun phrase, and…

A sample of 174 eleventh-grade students divided two passages into idea units (segments of information used when reading) and rated predetermined idea units according to three attributes that have been shown to correlate with recall. Standardized test scores for reading, scholastic aptitude, and general achievement were included in the analyses.…

The study examined the effects of questions on learning among 90 intermediate level educable mentally retarded children. Four types of learning were identified as relevant remembering, incidental remembering, relevant inferring, and incidental inferring. Results indicated that question position was an important variable in influencing the learning…

Eighty nursery school children were randomly divided into four groups of 20 and given a serial short-term memory task in which difficult-to-label stimuli were used. Three experimental groups were provided with labels for the stimuli. Of these, one group overtly pronounced the labels and rehearsed them during the task, one group merely pronounced…

Mock juries of six females each listened to a tape-recording of facts in a courtroom trial. Twelve juries heard guilt-appearing facts, and twelve heard innocent-appearing facts. In half the juries hearing each type of trial, jurors heard the facts in the same (Homogeneous) order; in the remaining juries, each of the six jurors heard the facts in a…

The conference from which the papers in this book are derived addressed the following questions: How is knowledge organized? How does knowledge develop? How is knowledge retrieved and used? What instructional techniques promise to facilitate the acquisition of new knowledge? Separate chapters address types of knowledge and purposes of education;…

Individuals previously identified as language-bound (LB) and language-optional (LO) participated in a series of experiments to study verbal fluency. The two groups showed a striking similarity in the number of responses they produced for categories with constraints at various levels (word form, word content, sentence, interpretation). This…

This paper discusses research on age related aspects of children's processing and comprehension of the narrative content of family oriented television programs. In one study, the temporal integration necessary to make inferences about audiovisually presented information was examined in 254 second, fifth and eighth grade children. Subjects were…

Nouns are generally recalled and recognized better in memory tasks, although several theoretical positions and a variety of empirical tasks indicate the importance of verbs to sentences. To try to resolve this paradox, several experiments were designed to explore the efficiency of various sentence elements as cues in recognition memory. Subjects…