The purpose of the two experiments was to assess the effects of two levels of stimulus redundancy and three levels of irrelevant visual stimulation on performance in a successive discrimination task and a reproduction task. The results indicate that increases in redundancy facilitated performance in the reproduction task but had no appreciable…

Children's language acquisition is viewed by developmental psycholinguists as a process of change in the organization of language processing operations. Normal children seem to acquire their native language by this process, rather than by eliminating specific mistakes. Preschool language develops in stages, and knowledge of where syntactic change…

This study had as its purpose the investigation of visual-verbal presentation modes when used for instruction in different types of learning tasks with learners of differing mental abilities. Five parallel experiments were conducted, each for a different learning objective or task (identification, comparison, classification, generalization,…

The Learning Research and Development Center, an institute composed of faculty from the University of Pittsburgh, has as its general purpose the scientific study of the problems of learning and instruction. Particular attention is given to the nature of the educational and psychological environment required to maximize the potential of the…

Fifty-four 5-year-old Head Start children participated in a study of the effect of varied versus repeated training on the development of the ability to categorize and transfer learning. The children were grouped according to chronological age and results of a mastery test and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Work categories translated into…

In this paper the author hopes to "persuade methodologists and foreign language teachers to attack the problem of foreign language acquisition" from what he considers to be a "more strategic angle." He is concerned with how language proficiency, rather than the individual skills, can be taught. The author doubts whether it is…

A study was devised to determine the validity and effectiveness of applying automation comcpets to rhythm instruction in music. Students from two semesters of a music class for the classroom teacher were divided randomly into experimental and control groups with 21 in the former and 29 in the latter. The experimental group read music from a…

The relation of arousal to retention in free learning was studied in a 3 x 2 design employing 48 undergraduates as Ss, three list conditions (high arousal, low arousal, mixed list) and two retention intervals (immediate and 3 days). Arousal value of the words was based on earlier studies. Contrary to previous paired-associate studies, no…

In three experiments employing 60 Ss, arousal was manipulated by white noise during paired-associate, serial, and free learning in an effort to investigate the relationships of arousal and long-term recall. Previous research suggested that high arousal in the paired-associate paradigm leads to better retention relative to low arousal. The present…

A promising area in educational research is the application of techniques of literary criticism to curriculum theory. Kenneth Burke's dramatistic system clarifies the five sources of motives in the drama--purpose, agency, scene, agent, and act. This pentad creates a possibly fruitful model that highlights the drama of the classroom. Contrasting…

Early childhood learning of language has led some to postulate innate knowledge of an abstract symbolic linguistic system. However, if the child's abstract understanding initially requires concrete support in the form of agreement of the message with his nonlinguistic experience, the indication would be that the development of syntactic…

Very little cognitive development research has been done among African children, and most of the completed studies have relied on "translated" versions of Western test materials that are inappropriate to the African milieu. This paucity of research has had two affects: (1) rural African children have been represented as somewhat less…

The purpose of this study was to determine if implicit associational responses (IARs) occur to individual words presented as pairs for associative learning. The occurrence of IARs was determined by a YES-NO recognition test, and IARs for words presented singly for study provided a base line. For all condition, false recognitions to assumed IARs…

Following a review of recent research in the University of Washington Department of Psychology project, Individual Differences in Cognition, analyses are reported linking performance in laboratory studies of cognition to performance on selected psychometric instruments. Intent of the study was to provide an empirical followup of Carrolls's (1974)…

The purpose of these studies was to provide evidence to support either the dual-coding hypothesis or the single-system hypothesis of human memory. In one experiment, college subjects were shown a mixed series of words and pictures either while simultaneously engaged in shadowing (repeating aloud) a prose passage presented via earphones or while…