In six experiments, we tested whether immediate serial recall is influenced by a word's degree centrality, an index of lexical connectivity. Words of high degree centrality are associated with more words in free association norms than those of low degree centrality. Experiment 1 analyzed secondary data to explore the effect of degree centrality in…

Research has observed that monitoring one's own learning modifies memory for some materials but not for others. Specifically, making judgments of learning (JOLs) while learning word pairs improves subsequent cued-recall memory performance for related word pairs but not for unrelated word pairs. Theories that have attempted to explain this pattern…

A large body of evidence shows an animacy effect on memory in that animate entities are better remembered than inanimate ones. Yet, the reason for this mnemonic prioritization remains unclear. In the survival processing literature, the assumption that richness of encoding is responsible for adaptive memory benefits has received substantial…

Two main mechanisms, articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing, are argued to be involved in the maintenance of verbal information in working memory (WM). Whereas converging research has suggested that rehearsal promotes the phonological representations of memoranda in working memory, little is known about the representations that…

Lexical inferencing is referred to as guessing the meaning of an unknown word using available linguistic and other clues. It is a primary lexical processing strategy to tackle unknown words while reading. This study aims to explore the clue use of Chinese EFL learners in inferring the meaning of unknown word in reading. Two types of introspective…

Examines the effects of having both a semantic and a superficial perceptual category for organizing lists of words in free recall. Discusses the effect of individual difference characteristics, such as personality characteristics of the subject, on the results. (EKN)

Four experiments are reported in which relations of semantic distance to response latencies in similarity judgments, to reaction times in a same-different classification task, and to proximity of recall in a free recall task were investigated. (Author/RM)

A study is reported in which pairs of synonyms, antonyms, coordinates, and super super-subordinates were presented dichotically to university students. After each pair the subject reported what he heard. In one condition the two members of a pair were presented simultaneously, and in another they were presented sequentially. (Author/RM)

In three experiments, fifth graders and college students watched a videotaped peer model executing two differentially effective associative-learning strategies. Observation of the model did not result in the consistent use of that strategy by fifth graders. College students did appear to benefit from the observational-learning opportunity.…

A study examined the efficacy of the keyword method of vocabulary instruction by comparing it with five methods designed to increase semantic processing of the definitions of the vocabulary words. Subjects in all five experiments were college students. In the first three experiments, recall of the definitions from the vocabulary words was the…

An earlier study showed that responses are remembered better when subjects produce them from cues, than when subjects read cue-response pairs. The decided memory advantage for generated targets relative to read ones is known as the generation effect. The present research is designed to study the generation effect for cues, following a…