Describes four experiments that examined the ability of second- and fifth-grade children and college adults to use "extra-list" cues to retrieve episodic information from memory. Shows that effective cue use varied with both the "match" of cue and event classification, and with the associative structure of permanent memory.…

Four experiments involving kindergarten, second grade, and college students revealed that even kindergarten children used statement information effectively in interpreting ambiguous utterances. All three groups had difficulty using status information. (RH)

Describes four experiments to show that the effects of item-specific and relational encoding emphasis on recall vary with the retrieval context for both young children and adults. (HOD)

Provides direct evidence of developmental differences in the processing of item-specific information, discussing how these differences affect recognition as well as recall performance in second graders, fifth graders, and college adults. Results suggest that retention varies as a result of the degree to which children differ from adults in…

Examines first- and third-grade children and college adults' ability to make excuse inferences about a speaker's use of an utterance and to modify those inferences appropriately upon receiving later information. Possible reasons for children's inflexibility were examined by varying the difficulty of relating the excuse interpretation and…

Examines the effects of integration complexity on the ability of child and adult listeners to integrate information. Increases in complexity adversely affected children's more than adults' resolution integration. The children's integration performance was affected by theme discontinuity and conferential complexity. (Author/AS)

Four experiments studied effects of difficulty of word identification on optional conceptual processing by second, third, and fifth graders, and college students in a cued recall task. Results indicated that contrastive processing facilitates recall, and that difficulty of word identification may limit the extent of optional contrastive…

Examined six- and eight-year-old children's use of contextual expectations to detect inconsistencies in story information and their ability to discriminate between information that resolved or was irrelevant to these inconsistencies. Results showed that six-year-olds frequently detected inconsistent events but that they failed to discriminate…

Investigates whether 7- and 10-year-old children and adults are sensitive to their own and another listener's failure to understand literal and nonliteral (sarcastic) uses of utterances. (HOD)

Children's use of contextual discrepancy and stressed intonation to interpret literal form and illocutionary function in the use of ironic utterances was examined in two experiments, each using first- and third-grade children and college-age adults. Results suggest a complex relationship between literal form and illocutionary function in…

Seven experiments examined word triplet recall of second graders, fifth graders, and college adults. Results include findings that successful cued recall in children is more dependent than that of adults on associative constraint provided in an episode and cue, and that children make relatively better use of thematic and subordinate than of…

Results of five experiments showed that in certain situations recall varied with processing difficulty for both children and college students. This was primarily due to enhanced cue discriminability. The relation between processing difficulty and developmental increases in recall seemed to be mediated by constructability problems and resource- and…

Four experiments examined the possibility that second and fourth graders and college students are sensitive to inference constraint when they make causal inferences and assess their understanding of a story. Inference likelihood and understanding ratings varied with constraint for all ages. Results suggest that comprehension monitoring and text…

Five experiments examined the cued recall of the last target words of primarily four-word (Bus-Airplane-Car-Train) category stimuli by children and adults. Focused on problems of gaining access to episodic search sets in recall. Results suggested that access to search set is more problematic for children than for adults. (RWB)

Five experiments examined the developmental relation between attention to target and context information and target memory among second and fifth graders and college adults. Results show that when the context is meaningfully related to target information, adults are less selective than children and are more likely to attend to context information.…