We explored 12-month-olds' flexibility in accepting phonotactically illegal or ill-formed word forms in a modified associative-learning task. Sixty-four English-learning infants were presented with a training phase that either clarified the purpose of a sound--object association task or left the task ambiguous. Infants were then habituated to sets…

Concerns about the ability of post-secondary students to read scholarly materials are well documented in the literature. A key aspect of reading at the deeper level expected of these students is connecting new information to prior knowledge. This study is based on an activity where students were explicitly required to make such connections as part…

Task-cuing experiments are usually intended to explore control of task set. But when small stimulus sets are used, they plausibly afford learning of the response associated with a combination of cue and stimulus, without reference to tasks. In 3 experiments we presented the typical trials of a task-cuing experiment: a cue (colored shape) followed,…

According to the retrieved context theory of episodic memory, the cue for recall of an item is a weighted sum of recently activated cognitive states, including previously recalled and studied items as well as their associations. We show that this theory predicts there should be compound cuing in free recall. Specifically, the temporal contiguity…

Humans are remarkably sensitive to the statistical structure of language. However, different mechanisms have been proposed to account for such statistical sensitivities. The present study compared adult learning of syntax and the ability of two models of statistical learning to simulate human performance: Simple Recurrent Networks, which learn by…

Attentional theories of associative learning and categorization propose that learning about the predictiveness of a stimulus influences the amount of attention that is paid to that stimulus. Three experiments tested this idea by looking at the extent to which stimuli that had previously been experienced as predictive or nonpredictive in a…

Fifty years ago, Mednick ["Psychological Review", 69 (1962) 220] proposed an elaborate model that aimed to explain how creative ideas are generated and why creative people are more likely to have creative ideas. The model assumes that creative people have flatter associative hierarchies and as a consequence can more fluently retrieve…

Participants performed a 2-choice categorization task on visible word targets that were preceded by novel (unpracticed) prime words. The prime words were presented for 33 ms and followed either immediately (Experiments 1-3) or after a variable delay (Experiments 1 and 4) by a pattern mask. Both subjective and objective measures of prime visibility…

Modern views on learning and memory accept the notion of biological constraints--that the formation of association is not uniform across all stimuli. Yet cellular evidence of the encoding of selective associations is lacking. Here, conditioned stimuli (CSs) and unconditioned stimuli (USs) commonly employed in two basic associative learning…

Background: Today, for most of us, technology is a vital and inevitable part of our lives. Due to its widespread use, a great emphasis is being given to educating generations about technology. And, every individual has his/her own style of organizing and collecting information. Purpose: The purpose of the present study is to identify the…

This paper reports the first investigation in the second language acquisition field assessing learners' implicit attitudes using the Implicit Association Test, a computerized reaction-time measure. Examination of the explicit and implicit attitudes of Arab learners of English (N = 365) showed that, particularly for males, implicit attitudes toward…

This paper evaluates the proposal that general associative mechanisms underlie the earliest stages of word learning but that these same general mechanisms, operating over language input, enable children to identify domain-specific cues that ultimately help to constrain word learning, rendering children more sophisticated language users. As a…

The mental lexicon plays a central role in reading comprehension (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014). It encompasses the number of lexical entries in spoken and written language (vocabulary breadth), the semantic quality of these entries (vocabulary depth), and the connection strength between lexical representations (semantic relatedness); as such, it…

We study the contribution of implicit relatedness to associative recognition in two experiments. In the first experiment, we showed an implicit improvement in recognition when the stimulus elements of each word pair shared common letters and they were unpaired at test. Moreover, when asked to study the stimuli under divided attention, recollection…

Using the blocked-translation paradigm with healthy participants, we examined Crutch and Warrington's hypothesis that concrete and abstract concepts are organized by distinct principles: concrete concepts by semantic similarities and abstract ones by associations. In three experiments we constructed two types of experimental blocking (similar…