The influence of two aspects of language structure, syntax and associativity, on the free recall of verbal messages was investigated. (Syntax refers to the rules for ordering words within sentences; associativity refers to the network of meaningful relationships which exist among words in a language.) Twenty-four children from each of grades…

After opening with a 13-page review of the literature, the document's main emphasis is on the three experiments included in this report. The specific rationale, procedures, and results of the three studies comprise the major portion of the document. The general purpose of Experiment 1 was to ascertain the effects of prior relevant subject matter…

The purpose of the experiment was to test the prediction that non-specific facilitated learning of a second prose passage will occur in the situation where an initial passage read by the subjects contained concrete referents designed to increase the comprehension of a difficult to understand second passage. Two-hundred and forty subjects…

Children in kindergarten, third grade, and fifth grade were presented a list of either pictures or words (with items presented varying numbers of times on the study trail). In both picture and word conditions, half of the subjects estimated how many times each item had been presented (absolute judgments) and the other half judged which of two…

This study examines the relative effects of motivational orientation, ability, social class, sex, and instructions to employ verbal mediation on a paired-associates (PA) learning task. One hundred ninety-two seventh and eighth grade students were categorized according to degree of Intrinsic Task Motivation (IM), ability, and social class (SES).…

Eight experiments are described in this report. In experiment 1, four and five year olds were presented four verbal discrimination (VD) lists. For three of the lists all correct items were either conceptually, acoustically, or affectively similar. The fourth was a control list. The conceptual list facilitated VD learning. Experiment 2 indicated…

A study of the effect of instructional pictures adjunct to science verbal material on learning performance was made among 80 high school biology students. The population was randomly assigned into two treatments: (1) Verbal statements (Vs) and (2) Vs plus pictures (Pt). The four independent variables were: (1) developing Pt directly from Vs, (2)…

This paper summarizes data comparing the correlation patterns of psychometric, social, and demographic variables with intelligence quotient (IQ) and learning potential (LP) scores derived from the Kohs Block Designs and Raven Progressive Matrices procedures. The sample consists of educable mentally retarded special class and institutionalized…

Two studies investigated characteristics of verbal elaborations (length and number of relations provided by the syntactic construction) to determine what makes them effective mediators for young children. Study I treated the role of an elaboration's length in facilitating paired associate learning in 22 nursery school children. Data indicated that…

A study was conducted to determine whether language provided for the child in discriminating specific criteria helps him significantly to learn to create and hold criteria for sorting, a major difference in the theories of Vygotsky and Piaget. Specifically three questions are investigated: (1) whether 3- to 5-year-old black ghetto children can be…

A verbal concept-learning task permitting the externalizing and quantifying of learning behavior and 16 ability tests were administered to female graduate students. Data were analyzed by alpha factor analysis and incomplete image analysis. Six alpha factors and 12 image factors were extracted and orthogonally rotated. Four areas of cognitive…

A model derived from information processing theory is described, which helps to explain the complex verbal learning of students and suggests implications for lecturing techniques. Other factors affecting learning, which are not covered by the model, are discussed in relationship to it: student's intellectual development and effects of individual…

Two studies were carried out demonstrating the interaction of intonation grouping and meaning relations between words in free recall. When the intonation grouping is in phase with the word relations, recall is facilitated. When it is out of phase, recall is lowered. (Author/RM)

Two detection experiments were conducted with short lists of synthetic speech stimuli where phoneme targets were compared to syllable targets. Results suggest that phonemes and syllables are equally basic to speech perception. (Author/RM)

An experiment is described that involved presenting sentences to the subject for study and then testing single words for recognition (the subject had to decide whether the test word was in one of the study sentences). A large priming effect was obtained. (Author/RM)