The developmental memory research with children indicates that highly variable rehearsal leads to better overall recall and that the strength of interitem associations may play some role in improving recall. This paper reports on two experiments to investigate the interplay between the number and strength of interitem associations, and how each is…

Research supported by the U.S. Office of Education and the Center for Research in Human Learning at the University of Minnesota.

A study extended word association methodology beyond isolated word stimuli to investigate the effects of written context on the meanings that proficient readers impart to words. A repeated-measures design was used to assess the responses of 62 sixth grade readers to target words at three levels: no context, limited context, and expanded context.…

Two separate studies were designed to investigate the effect of reading the first word of a pair on the speed of recognizing the second. One study drew its subjects from the college level; the other from the fourth grade. A Scientific Prototype Three-Channel Tachistoscope was used, and an erasing image was flashed immediately following the…

A view of word-phrase comprehension instruction as making joint use of language mediation and inductive approaches to secure concept learning is presented. The concept learning task considered appears appropriate to objectives of primary instruction and at variance with tasks that typify concept learning research. (Author)

Assessed the effect of associative (response) interference on the word associations of male and female process and reactive schizophrenics in two studies that used the difference in associative disturbances between high and low interference (low and high commonality stimulus words) as the measure. Findings supported predictions from a qualitative…

This study examined the influence of semantic consistency (meaningfulness) and anomaly on the learning of three types of syntactic pairs. The results showed that meaningful pairs are learned with fewer errors than anomalous pairs. (Author)

Using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm with the boundary placed after word n, the experiment manipulated preview of word n + 2 for fixations on word n. There was no preview benefit for 1st-pass reading on word n + 2, replicating the results of K. Rayner, B. J. Juhasz, and S. J. Brown (2007), but there was a preview benefit on the 3-letter…

A study of the commonality of associations of 50 lexical and 50 structural words by 80 kindergarten children indicated that (1) there was no significant difference in commonality of responses between lexical and structural words, (2) there was a difference in commonality relations for the sexes, and (3) there was more commonality in responses to…

Paper sets out an attempt to use the changes in implicit associative responses resulting from semantic constraints to examine some features of the associative network aroused by the perception of a complete sentence. (Author)

Research supported by grants from the National Science Foundation. (DS)

There is debate about whether preschool-age children interpret words as referring to kinds or to classes defined by shape similarity. The authors argue that the shape bias reported in previous studies is a task-induced artifact rather than a genuine word-learning strategy. In particular, children were forced to extend an object's novel label to…

The behavior of native English speakers and Japanese English as second language (ESL) learners on word association tasks was investigated. Research has shown that Japanese adults respond in Japanese in an identifiably different way than English speaking adults respond in English, and that native English speaking children demonstrate a…