One of the challenges of learning Japanese as a Second Language (JSL) is finding the appropriate word for a particular usage. To address this challenge, we developed a collocational aid designed to suggest more appropriate collocations in Japanese. In particular, we address the problem of generating and ranking noun and verb candidates for…

An event-related potentials (ERPs) study examined word-to-text integration processes across sentence boundaries. In a two-sentence passage, the accessibility of a referent for the first content word of the second sentence (the target word) was varied by the wording of the first sentence in one of the following ways: lexically (explicitly using…

Third grade pupils learned paired associates with nonsense words serving as stimuli and familiar nouns serving as responses. Half the subjects looked at concretizing pictures of the paired items and heard sentences or labels only. Sentences without pictured stimuli impaired learning, while sentences with pictures facilitated learning…

RESULTS OF AN EARLIER STUDY SUGGEST THAT SENTENCES BEGINNING WITH NOUNS OF HIGH RESPONSE STRENGTH ARE EASIER TO LEARN THAN SENTENCES ENDING WITH NOUNS OF HIGH RESPONSE STRENGTH. THE INFERENCE DERIVED FROM THAT STUDY, AND TESTED IN THE PRESENT STUDY, WAS THAT THE ORDER OF A WORD IN NATURAL SPEECH IS A FUNCTION OF RESPONSE STRENGTH, SO THAT WORDS…

The experimental results reported here indicate that sentences are remembered and recalled in terms of semantic representations of the indicated words or concepts rather than in terms of phonological representations. (FB)

Results of the feedback experiments reported here were: (1) feedback facilitated learning when it followed wrong responses; (2) feedback had no effect on learning following correct responses; (3) feedback consisting of both the stimulus and the response was superior to no feedback, whereas feedback consisting of only the response did not differ…

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…

The purpose of this study was to test associative skills by means of a paired-associate task with varied mediational instructions. Subjects were 84 first grade ghetto children, 25% of whom were from Spanish-speaking homes; virtually all the other subjects were black. The 3 x 2 x 4 factorial design included: three mediation sets (imagery,…

The major finding of the present experiment was that children as young a 7 or 8 (second graders) were able to employ an induced visual-imagery strategy to facilitate paired-associate learning. (Authors)

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

The effects of distinctive background settings on children's recognition memory for subjects and objects of related sentences was examined. As a follow-up to a study by Levin, Ghatala, and Truman (1979), the effects of presenting distinctive background contexts in sentences and multiple-choice tests were separated from the effects of providing…

This study extends some recently acquired knowledge about the development of visual imagery as an associative-learning strategy. Incorporating the present findings into the data already gathered, it appears that as a facilitator, sentence production precedes imagery generation since preoperational children benefit from instructions to engage in…

The effects of three types of pretraining in the use of syntactical verbal mediators on subsequent paired-associate performance were investigated. Subjects were 40 Negro and 40 white first graders randomly assigned to one of four groups. Condition 1 consisted of pretraining in both "mediation" instruction (experimenter gave subjects a sentence…

The effects of two types of elaboration training (imagery and sentence generation) on the paired associate learning of 32 educable mentally retarded children (aged 9 to 13 years were compared over two levels of verbalization (none and overt). Each S was first tested on a warmup list, then trained to generate elaborations, and finally given two…