The purpose of this study was to determine whether children as young as second-graders could encode categorically within an abstract evaluative dimension. The study uses mode of stimulus presentation (auditory or visual) as an independent variable. The subjects were 40 white middle class children from grades 2, 4, and 6, who were randomly assigned…

This paper presents a schema developed to investigated story recall in elementary school children, and describes the results of a study which tested the schema with first and fifth graders. The story schema, a theoretical model which formally defines the types of strategies, operations, and structures inherent in the processor of story…

This study was conducted in order to compare the effects of immediate practice and delayed practice on retention of learned rules. Seventh-grade students (N=103) were instructed on three rules of operation with exponents by programmed text. These subjects were randomly assigned to five treatment groups: (1) no practice, (2) one practice trial on…

Two studies examined the effectiveness of pupillary measurements to indicate cognitive processes in educable mentally retarded (EMR) and nonretarded elementary and high school students. In the first study, pupillary scores from 20 nonretarded and 10 EMR students were measured for two conditions of an auditory task: listening and remembering.…

This study represents an attempt to describe the second-language competence of English-speaking children who are learning French as a second language. The performance of fourth- and sixth-grade children taking part in a French immersion program was compared to that of French-speaking children of the same age using an elicited imitation task. The…

This review of Bever's psycholinguistics survey is for the most part favorable. Commentary is centered on sections 1, 2, 4, and 6 of the report. The survey's first part is judged significant in that Wundt's pioneering work in psycholinguistics is discussed. The second section, on grammar as a psychological process, is found obscure in its…

Preschool readiness measures were secured on 35 pairs of disadvantaged 2- to 3-year-old lower SES black children, representing large and small families, to determine the impact of family size on readiness profiles. The findings reveal that blacks from small families achieved significantly higher scores on 3 of the 9 skill areas: Visual Memory,…

This study begins a systematic examination of the role that content of materials used in experimental free recall tasks, as well as the origin plus the appropriateness of designated "conceptual categories," play in determining mnemonic performance of different groups. It will deliberately engineer the way materials are derived and…

Visual and auditory stimuli were presented to children to measure symbol processing abilities. Slides which required matching the similarities in two objects in a group of three were presented. At times the matching criteria varied between function, color, and form. Reaction time was quicker when matching by color than by function, which was…

A skilled cognitive theorist might help behaviorists resolve inconsistencies found from their experimentation with imaginal mnemonics in paired-associate and serial learning tasks. Iconic cognition which relegates verbal processes to short-term storage and output systems is inadequate to explain the verbal coding and elaboration processes…

Fifth-grade and college students in two experiments listened to tape-recorded sentences and completed tests of immediate recall. The first experiment investigated the effect of a listener's expectations upon his understanding of a sentence. Sometimes the "most probable" answer was not congruent with the "correct" answer, suggesting that the…

Intended for parents, the handbook describes characteristics of learning disabled (LD) children and offers activities that the child can perform in the home to build skill proficiency. It is explained that the activities are designed to relieve the parent and child of constant awareness of the disability, to avoid use of special materials and…

The results of a number of experiments with the memorizing of several different subject-matters are presented in such a way that the relationship between number of opportunities for error (word elements faded) and number of errors actually made can be observed for individuals and groups. The particular selection of word elements to be taught by…

Two studies were conducted with English speakers to investigate (1) the facilitative effects of melodic features of speech, and (2) whether poor readers (without evidence of sensory defect) show a greater impairment than good readers when melodic features are made unavailable in the speech input. It was hypothesized that when melodic cues are not…

A method for assessing the structure of organization was developed on the basis of the ordinal separation, or proximity, between pairs ot items in recall protocols over a series of trials. The proximity measure is based on the assumption, common to all indices of organization, that items which are coded together in subjective memory units will…