Developmental selective learning processes of elementary school age children were investigated using two types of incidental learning methodologies. The purposes of this study were to: (1) compare the effects of the two types of incidental learning paradigms, and (2) determine the influence of different kinds of stimulus relationships on…

This paper reports three experiments concerning methodological issues in studies on incidental learning performance which use verbal and nonverbal procedures and which appear to be hampered by differences in stimulus materials, learning opportunities, and dependent measures. The first study, using 128 children from grades 3, 5, 7, and 9, attempted…

Hypothesizes that good spellers read by full cues while poor spellers read by partial cues, and also investigates short term memory differences between the two groups. Finds good spellers were faster readers, better at identifying matches and mismatches between similar nonsense words, and had better short term memories than poor spellers. (SKC)

The keyword and context methods of learning new vocabulary were compared using university students as subjects. The keyword method was substantially better for recall of definitions when provided, but it was not significantly better on the free recall task. (LMO)

The memory performance of 30 seventh and 30 eleventh graders was examined as a function of instructional conditions on two different cued recall tasks. The relationship between meta-memory and actual performance during adolescence was studied. Results concern performance based on elaborative prompting, controlled instructions, and the students'…

Good readers performed better than poor readers on temporal order retention tests as expected, but contrary to expectation, also maintained their superiority on the spatial tasks. However, error pattern differences supported earlier evidence linking poor readers' short-term memory deficiencies to reduced effectiveness of phonetic representation.…

Types of comparisons for evaluation of mnemonics were identified based on equating exposure to the to-be-learned associations or on total study time. Experiments on the cueword method illustrated how highly analytical experiments on mnemonics might be conducted and how choice of comparisons in research could affect mnemonic evaluation. (Author/DWH)

Examines the role of organization in adults' processing of stories. Canonical stories were better recalled than noncanonical stories by all three age groups (young, middle-aged, and old adults), and a variety of measures indicated that older adults' recall was both quantitatively and qualitatively similar to that of young adults. (SL)

Groups of good and poor readers were tested on free recall of 10-word lists. The poor readers demonstrated as strong a recency effect as the good readers, but showed inferiority in immediate memory span. The results demonstrate a degree of dissociation between the recency effect and memory span. (Author/KC)

Examined the effects of orienting task-controlled processing on text recall of younger, middle-aged, and older adults. Younger adults recalled more when recall was intentional or when preceded by a deep-orienting task. Middle-aged and older adults recalled more when recall was intentional regardless of depth of orienting task. (Author)

Experiments demonstrate that in bilingual subjects, Welsh digits take longer to articulate than their English equivalents, explaining why norms for Welsh children on the digit span test of the Welsh Children's Intelligence Scale are less than those for the same age American children. (Author/KC)

Encoding voice information is a cognitively effortful, age sensitive process. For older adults, enhanced voice encoding under the intentional condition, relative to the incidental condition, was accompanied by a significant decrement in sentence recall. The age difference apparently reflects the diminished processing capacity of older adults.…

A technique was devised for constructing a text story which subjects agreed matched the dialogueless movie "The Red Balloon" in episodic structure. It relies partly on subjects judging where episodes and their components were located in the stories. Differences in content in movie and text recall are discussed. (SW)

Assessed age-related changes in 2- to 4-year olds' verbal and nonverbal memory for the same unique event. Found that children's performance on each memory measure increased as a function of age. Children with more advanced language skills reported more during the verbal interview and exhibited superior nonverbal memory relative to children with…