To develop a coherent description of the knowledge and processes involved in skillful word recognition, a study was devised in which 16 adults participated in four related experiments. The purpose of the first experiment was to examine some basic aspects of the processing of words, pseudowords, and nonwords and to discover basic differences in…

Three conjunctive concept-learning problems were presented to 70 educable mentally retarded (EMR) children (9 to 14 years old) and 76 controls (7 to 10 years old) to assess the effects of four verbalization conditions and the presence or absence of a memory aid on concept attainment. Verbalization conditions were the following. (1) no…

Cued-recall and two-alternative, forced-choice recognition measures were used to evaluate subjects' retention of the specific wordings of studied texts. Results obtained after 10-minute and 24 hour retention intervals suggest that the studied wordings of texts are functional components of their memory representations. Theories that assume…

A framework for viewing human text comprehension, memory, and recall is presented that assumes patterns of abstract conceptual relations are used to guide processing. These patterns consist of clusters of knowledge that encode prototypical co-occurrences of situations and events in narrative texts. The patterns are assumed to be a part of a…

Developmental selective learning processes of elementary school age children were investigated using two types of incidental learning methodologies. The purposes of this study were to: (1) compare the effects of the two types of incidental learning paradigms, and (2) determine the influence of different kinds of stimulus relationships on…

The purpose of these studies was to test a theory of associative context (defined as the association between two words in a pair) on recognition memory. The theory states that culturally associated words in a pair and nonassociated words in a pair differ after a single study trial in terms of their frequency representation in memory. Two…

In an earlier study, subjects who were shown the two words "inside" and "consult" at two different points in a study list of two syllable words were willing to accept the word "insult" as having been on the study list. It was concluded that each syllable had a representation in memory over and beyond the semantic factors which are normally…

The purpose of this study was to provide a more complete understanding of the storage and retrieval processes of developmentally different youngsters. Forty-four second and fourth grade subjects were given a lesson consisting of 25 facts to learn and remember. Half of the group learned the facts in a context containing superordinate statements…

Volume 2, the appendix to the final report of Project FAST, consists of prose selections used to study the effects of text reduction techniques on the comprehension and recall of written materials among visually handicapped and hearing impaired subjects. Each selection is presented in various versions such as 10 percent subjective deleted, 20…

This paper reports three experiments concerning methodological issues in studies on incidental learning performance which use verbal and nonverbal procedures and which appear to be hampered by differences in stimulus materials, learning opportunities, and dependent measures. The first study, using 128 children from grades 3, 5, 7, and 9, attempted…

The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into the nature of the reading process through an understanding of the general nature of sensory processing mechanisms which reorganize and restructure input signals for central recognition, and an understanding of how the grammar of the language functions in defining the set of possible sentences in…

This report describes research on Bartlett's theory of constructive memory. In experiment one, schematic retention is related to Tulving's distinction between episodic and semantic memory. With the passage of time, memory for prose reflects decreasing output from episodic memory and increasing output from semantic memory. In experiment two,…

In this study, a procedure was devised to experimentally separate the spatial and temporal task components of a serial-position recall task in an attempt to account for the primacy effect observed in experiments using this paradigm with young children and retarded subjects. A total of 48, 5- to 7-year-old, children were tested in a serial-position…

This research concerns the distinction between processes in sentence comprehension and those in sentence memory. Comprehension was monitored by timing subjects while they decided whether a sentence is true or false. The memory process was tapped by examining subject's incidental memory for the sentences they previously verified. The verification…

Three research studies were performed to assess patterns of memory organization with respect to complementary and similarity dimensions, referring to associations based on functional relatedness and grammatical relatedness, respectively. The first study failed to replicate the results of a study by Denney and Ziobrowski (1972), indicating that…