A study was conducted to provide an assessment of the general efficiency of working memory in relation to level of field articulation. The task required a subject to retain a series of digits for subsequent report while performing a semantic modification of a target phrase. The working memory hypothesis predicts that the joint impact of high…

Using PLATO, a computer-assisted instruction system, a test was conducted to see if students respond most favorably to an instructional package that included no graphic display, still graphic display, or animated graphic display. Forty-five students at the Naval Training Center, San Diego, were the subjects. With the learning of the sine-ratio…

This study incorporated a correlational methodology into an experimental context to determine the functional components of rehearsal strategies in children's discrimination learning. The subjects for this study were 120 fifth- and sixth-grade children attending two elementary schools located in middle-class areas of Ogden, Utah. According to the…

The method of organization in free recall in the form of either clustering or subjective organization is explored in this study. This is just one of the possible forms of retrieval that may be employed. Other possibilities include serial recall, alphabetization, and imagery. To the extent that subjects employ such other strategies, correlations…

This paper is a draft for the American Psychological Association Symposium on the conditioning of verbal behavior and attitudes. The author presents the results of several studies he conducted in the classical conditioning of meaning and attitude. These studies attempt to control the measurement effects created by extraneous variables operating on…

The primary purpose for conducting the present experiment was to assess the effects of an associative-attribute--for example, stimulus meaningfulness (m) on the learning rates of different age group children. An attempt was also made to assess the effects of age and m on a measure of subjective organization. This research consisted of two studies:…

Verbal analogy items, consisting of an ambiguous stimulus word pair and two unambiguous response word pairs as choice alternatives, were presented to psychology students in a counterbalanced design to discover if preferences existed between the two competing relations in each item. The data were analyzed to see if these preferences ordered…

The essays included in this periodical focus on teaching elementary school children how to appreciate and how to write poetry. "Children, Poetry, and Memorization," by J.F.S. Smeall, outlines the historical basis, and perceptual limitations, of the use of print media alone in classroom instruction. Suggestions for encouraging children's recitation…

The mnemonic consequences of semantic, acoustic, and orthographic encoding and the relationships between encoding and retrieval cues were investigated in an incidental-learning experiment involving 24 first-, third-, and fifth-grade pupils. Each child was asked one orienting question for each of 18 words; the questions differed in the type of…

Twenty 3-year-old, home reared, Down's Syndrome children and eight 3-year-old normal children were studied to examine the verbal learning characteristics of Down's Syndrome children in typical preschool learning tasks. Prior to the study, research on characteristics of verbal learning deficits in retarded individuals and on verbal skill training…

The purpose of this study was to investigate and compare the patterns of psycholinguistic abilities of lower and middle class Negro and white children. The subjects for the study were 160 second grade children in the 90 to 110 IQ range from Northeast Louisiana. They were subgrouped by race and social class (lower-lower, upper-lower, lower-middle,…

This research evaluated the total-time hypothesis for the learning of connected discourse--that in verbal learning "a fixed amount of time is necessary to learn a fixed amount of material regardless of the number of individual trials into which that time is divided." Learning material consisted of two sets of connected discourse for each of the…

A study of the extent to which relationships exist between pupils' verbal associative learning ability and seven indices of pupil ability to verbalize utilized 32 third-grade and 34 fifth-grade pupils randomly selected from six Las Cruces schools. Raw data were collected from transcribed language samples, the Verbal Paired-Associate Test, the…

To investigate organizational strategies of educable mentally retarded (EMR) and normal boys, the performance of 30 normal boys (mean IQ 105.1) and 30 EMR boys (mean IQ 69.9), ages 7-12 years, was compared on various free recall learning tasks. Three measures of input organization employed were category clustering, associative clustering, and…

Forty preschool Negro children took part in a study to test the effect of oral response versus listening in improving the spoken language of disadvantaged children. It was hypothesized that children who echo and produce sentences in response to an instruction to select the appropriate picture to match a spoken sentence would show greater verbal…