The effects of five elaboration conditions on the paired associate learning of 50 educable mentally retarded children (mean age 9 years) were investigated. Four of the conditions were included in a two factor design (type of relation x familiarity); the fifth (nonsense condition) was included as an outside control. Ten children were tested in each…

Reported were two studies designed to clarify the effects of verbal elaboration on children's learning. Study I was undertaken to replicate, with controlled training times, an earlier investigation of the effects of three types of extended verbal elaboration (sentences, semantic paragraphs, and syntactic paragraphs). Trials to criterion analyses…

Two studies investigated characteristics of verbal elaborations (length and number of relations provided by the syntactic construction) to determine what makes them effective mediators for young children. Study I treated the role of an elaboration's length in facilitating paired associate learning in 22 nursery school children. Data indicated that…