Isolates emitted a significantly greater proportion of idiosyncratic associates than did nonisolates, and isolates emitted an idiosyncratic associate significantly earlier in a series of associations than nonisolates. (Author/DLS)

This study used a series of analogy problems to test children's associative and conceptual abilities and showed that children with stronger associative abilities do not rely excessively on associative strategies. (MM)

Implicit measures such as the Implicit Association Test (OAT) have recently become popular as tools in research on evaluative conditioning. The reason is that these measures are thought to be impervious to changes in valence that are due to conscious propositional knowledge about the relation between the conditioned stimulus (CS) and the…

Numeric values of psychological measures often have an arbitrary character before research has grounded their meanings, thereby providing what S. J. Messick (1995) called consequential validity (part of which H. Blanton and J. Jaccard now identify as metric meaningfulness). Some measures are predisposed by their design to acquire meanings easily,…

The study examined whether an animal naming task would discriminate between 286 normal students (grades K-9) and 123 language disordered students (5-16 years old). The task was of a free and controlled association type for identifying word retrieval problems. Each subject (S) was administered the task individually in the school or clinic setting.…

PREVIOUS STUDIES REPORT THAT CHILDREN WHO ARE GOOD READERS DIFFER IN RESPONSE CONSENSUALITY FROM POOR READERS IN A WORK-ASSOCIATION TASK INVOLVING VERBAL OR PICTORIAL STIMULI. TO DETERMINE WHETHER THIS NONCONSENSUALITY EXISTS AMONG ADULTS FROM DIFFERENT READING LEVELS, 15 ADULTS WERE RANDOMLY CHOSEN FROM EACH OF THREE GROUPS--(1) AN ADULT BASIC…

Data based on the single word responses children made to visually presented alphabet letter stimuli were examined and compared with earlier adult studies. One hundred and eighty sixth-grade students from two elementary schools participated in the study. The subjects responded by writing the first word they thought of beginning with the letter…

Based in part on an MS thesis (Fuller), University of Massachusetts.

Describes a semantic priming task using both words and pictures as primes and targets in an investigation of the order of access to certain kinds of stored information. Results suggest that naming represents a shallower level of processing than categorization for both words and pictures. (EKN)

The authors investigated whether effects of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) are influenced by salience asymmetries, independent of associations. Two series of experiments analyzed unique effects of salience by using nonassociated, neutral categories that differed in salience. In a 3rd series, salience asymmetries were manipulated…

In their comment on K. Rothermund and D. Wentura, A. G. Greenwald, B. A. Nosek, M. R. Banaji, and K. C. Klauer agreed that salience asymmetries can be a source of Implicit Association Test (IAT) effects. The authors applaud this conclusion but point to problems with the other points that Greenwald et al. made. The authors have difficulties…

Determining students' knowledge structure is important for assessing what a learner knows about a domain of knowledge. Traditional assessment methods are not always appropriate for exploring students' knowledge structure and changes during the learning period. This study investigates how the existing knowledge structure of the learners interacts…