Three experiments were conducted to determine the effectiveness of verbal and imaginal rehearsal strategies in children's discrimination learning. With verbal materials, imaging the referent of the correct item was more facilitative than vocalizing the correct item, as long as the former strategy was defined in a manner conducive to effective…

A total of 45 fifth grade students were the subjects of an experiment offering support for a component of learning strategy (memory imagery). Various theoretical explanations of the image-tracing phenomenon are considered, including depth of processing, dual coding and frequency. (MS)

Two experiments investigated the role of children's spontaneous conceptual "biases" in pictorial discrimination learning. The results suggested that such biases may serve either to facilitate or to interfere with discrimination learning. Moreover, in each experiment, age by treatment interactions revealed that in comparison to the behavior of…

The present study affords an explanation for the consistent, but not always statistically significant, pattern showing superior verbal discrimination learning performance for low- as compared to high-frequency words. In a frequency judgment task it was found that relative to high-frequency words, low-frequency words for which subjects (sixth…

When 112 fifth- and sixth-graders were observed for their use of one of two possible rehearsal strategies in verbal discrimination learning tasks, the strategy in which the children generated a functional explanation of the word showed a positive influence on simple frequency discriminations. Data analyses also indicate that under this strategy…