The primary purpose of the present study was to determine whether recent findings documenting the benefits of text-related motor activity on young children's memory for reading passages [Glenberg, A. M., Gutierrez, T., Levin, J. R., Japuntich, S., & Kaschak, M. (2004). Activity and imagined activity can enhance young readers' reading…

Attempts to identify specific components of a complex associative task, foreign language vocabulary learning, that might be particularly sensitive to developmental differences in imagery generation ability. Subjects were 95 second grade children enrolled in four schools and 90 sixth grade children enrolled in two of these same schools. (Author/MP)

To test the comparative efficacy of a visual imagery associative learning strategy in younger and older children, second and sixth grade children were presented a list of paired associates (concrete nouns) either at a faster or slower rate, under either an instruction to generate an interactive image for the pairs or a no strategy, control…

Findings were that imagery instructions for picture pairs were generally more facilitative than imagery instructions for word pairs, with children at this age exhibiting little variability in their capacity to utilize a visual imagery strategy when pictures comprised the learning materials. (Authors)

The role of motor activity in children's formation of dynamic mental imagery was investigated in 2 experiments using a paired-associate recognition task. (Authors)

A review of the literature on the function of pictures in prose learning indicates that visual illustrations are helpful to children's learning, but that visual imagery has inconsistent effects on prose learning, although it seems to have potential for assisting those with adequate word recognition but low comprehension. A conceptual framework has…

Four groups of 10- to 16-year-old educable mental retardates listened to a 20-sentence story; subjects (1) viewed pictures; (2) generated mental pictures; (3) heard each sentence twice; or (4) listened to the story once. Recall of story information was highest for those who viewed pictures. (Author/GDC)

Kindergarten and first-grade children listened to a narrative passage under one of five experimental conditions. Prelearning imagery instructions did not facilitate subsequent recall of story information. Similarly intermittently provided pictures did not produce recall gains for unpictured story information, but had a positive effect on recall of…

Kindergarten children were administered a paired-associate learning task at the beginning and end of the school-year, under either regular (control) or self-generated visual imagery instructions. Age predicted performance in the imagery but not in the control condition. Results supported the developmental imagery hypothesis. (Author/RD)

Sixth graders from a semirural midwestern community were randomly assigned to one of four different learning strategies--imagery, overt repetition, covert repetition, and control. Results showed that imagery instructions facilitated learning performance; overt repetition interfered with performance; and covert repetition was similar to the control…

High and low achievers listened to 20 sentences under imagery or repetition instructions. The next day, learning was assessed by multiple choice items in which correct alternatives were stated in either verbatim or synonym form, and incorrect alternatives contained either familiar or new words. Implications for test construction were discussed.…