Subjects in three age groups judged absolute and relative frequencies of pictures and words presented in lists. There was relatively greater improvement with age in judgment of pictorial stimuli. Study results lend support to the frequency theory of discrimination learning. (DP)

Previous research has demonstrated that requiring children to trace from memory the correct member of a pictorial discrimination pair markedly facilitates performance. The subjects for the first experiment in this study were 45 fifth grade students. The control group was given regular discrimination learning instructions. The image-trace group was…

Two experiments investigated the role of kindergarten and elementary school children's spontaneous cognitive sets in pictorial discrimination learning. Data indicated that, in comparison to the behavior of older children, the behavior of kindergarteners is governed more by the perceptible than by the conceptual attributes of stimuli. (GO)

In a recently reported study, the functional components of imagery and vocalization strategies in children's verbal discrimination learning were examined, following the combined experimental/correlational logic of Underwood. The present research extends those results to a strategy that (unlike imagery and vocalization) has a positive influence on…

This study consisted of two experiments. In the first experiment, 40 college students gave frequency ratings for concrete and abstract words which were equated on normative frequency. From the results it was concluded that abstract (low imagery) words, even though the two sets of words are of equal frequency. In the second experiment, different…

Experiments showed that in verbal discrimination learning imaging the referent of the correct item was more facilitative than vocalizing the correct item, as long as the imagery structure was executed in the company of relevant motor activity. No difference between the two strategies was found in pictorial discrimination learning. (Author/BJG)

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…

This study was concerned with the effect of situational frequency manipulations on subsequent discrimination learning. The subjects were 104 fourth-grade children attending two elementary schools located in middle-class residential areas. Twenty-six subjects were randomly assigned to each of two picture conditions. The other 52 subjects were…

Results of this experiment suggest that pronunciation has a unique effect on discrimination learning, and that the magnitude of this effect (relative to control performance) varies as a function of the type of materials used and the age of Ss. (Authors)

Results lend partial support to the proposition that the effectiveness of a particular rehearsal strategy depends on the degree to which it provides a discriminative cue for the materials on hand: With homonym pairs, imagery constituted such a discriminative cue, while vocalization did not; with synonym pairs, the converse was true. (Authors/CB)

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…

Subjects at three age levels were administered picture pair or word pair discrimination lists. They pronounced or pointed as a method of choice, and they pronounced or pointed at the correct item (or remained silent) during rehearsal. The results indicated that with picture pairs, pronunciation facilitated learning as a method of choice and a type…

This experiment was a direct test of the hypothesis that picture-word differences in discrimination learning are a function of apparent frequency differences associated with two types of material. The subjects consisted of 80 sixth graders randomly selected from two elementary schools located in middle-class neighborhoods. Each subject was tested…