The present experiment compared noun-pair learning, with and without sentence elaboration, on pairs representing all combinations of high and low frequency of usage on the stimulus and response side. (Author)

Research supported in part by a contract with the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity OEO-2404.

Second and sixth graders were asked to learn noun pairs linked by various types of verbal connectives: Verbs, unmarked and marked comparative adjectives, polar antonym adjective pairs, and conjunctions. Results indicated that all contexts produced better learning than conjunctions, that comparative adjective effects were superior to the polar-pair…

LISTS OF HIGH ASSOCIATION AND LOW ASSOCIATION SENTENCES WERE PREPARED FROM CONTROLLED ASSOCIATION NORMS. AN INTRA-LIST INTERFERENCE CONDITION WAS CREATED FOR HIGH ASSOCIATION SENTENCES BY PAIRING THE NOUN PHRASE OF ONE SENTENCE WITH THE VERB PHRASE OF ANOTHER SENTENCE IN THE SAME LIST. A SIMILAR PROCEDURE WAS FOLLOWED WITH THE LOW ASSOCIATION…

Two experiments on unaided and cued recall of sentences presented in context to college students are reported in this study. Key nouns in the sentences were arranged to have uniform surface functions, but to vary independently in deep syntactic category and semantic function. Cued recall for sentences in which the semantic function of actor and…

Results of this study offer clear evidence that the verb facilitation effect in children's associative learning is not dependent on the presentation of a consistent verb connective. (Author)

The deep structure description of a sentence marks the actual grammatical relationships that exist among the words. It is in the deep structure that "meaning" is rendered. Two sentences that are marked differently in deep structure might give rise to the same description in surface structure. Three experiments examined the "psychological reality"…

Results indicated that variations in deep structure grammatical relations but not surface structure complexity influenced noun pair retrieval. (Author)

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…

Measures of oral language, verbal associative learning, and nonverbal IQ were collected from a mixed unilingual and bilingual random sample of 66 third- and fifth-grade pupils in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Correlational techniques were employed to determine whether, and to what extent, relationships existed between verbal associative learning skill…

This paper reports on three separate experiments conducted to examine the roles of particular task and subject characteristics in noun pair learning. In all three studies noun pairs were presented either in noun-verb-noun-conjunction-pronoun (NVNCP) or noun-conjunction-noun-verb-pronoun (NCNVP) contexts. In experiment 1, learning was assessed…

Study investigated the effects of task difficulty on the paired-associate learning of retardates when extended elaboration conditions are employed. (Authors)