In order to determine if infants possessed contingency awareness and if it were related to a temporal unit, two hypotheses were constructed. (1) Reinforcement of a response would probably lead to emission of that response only if the infant's next response occurred within a period of time during which he could remember the preceding…

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…

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…

Thirty-six normal 5-year-olds and 60 educable mentally retarded (EMR) students with a mean age of 7 years were tested to determine whether specific formats of interrogatives would be instrumental in inducing the generation of effective verbal mediators. Ten EMR Ss and 6 normal Ss were tested on 21 paired associates in each six experimental…

Ninety-nine preoperational stage children learned 24 pictorial paired-associates at one of three levels of concreteness: low detail line drawings, high detail line drawings, high detail line drawings with a verbal prompt. Within each of these groups, one-third of the subjects received either visual attentional training, no training, or were…

This study examined the effects on long-term retention of variations in intensity and of temporal parameters of arousal following a single learning trial in a paired-associate task. The subjects were 56 female university students. Intensity of arousal was manipulated by using two levels of white noise--75 decibels and 90 decibels sound pressure…

The effects of five verbal elaboration conditions on the paired associate learning of 50 elementary-aged educable mentally retarded children were investigated. Four of the conditions, crossing functional and positional relations in familiar or unfamiliar events, were included in a two-factor design (type of relation x familiarity); the fifth…

Subjects, differing in imagery ability, learned a list of paired associates with the presence of a verbal context related to the stimulus item, with a pictorial context related to the stimulus item, or without the presence of any context. Following testing for recall, the subjects were required to learn one of two transfer lists. Both lists were…

Two experiments aimed at extending the principles of paired-associates learning transfer to the acquisition of reading skills are reported. Approximately 15 first graders were randomly assigned to each of the 10 treatment conditions. In the first experiment, four types of letter training were compared to two control conditions. The experimental…

The deep structure description of a sentence marks the actual grammatical relationships that exist among the words. It is in the deep structure that "meaning" is rendered. Two sentences that are marked differently in deep structure might give rise to the same description in surface structure. Three experiments examined the "psychological reality"…

The concepts in a hierarchically structured list consisting of 24 number-word pairs were aligned systematically with position and numbers, or with the number stimuli only. Some lists involved an alignment appropriate to only the lowest conceptual level. Other lists were completely unstructured when viewed in terms of either position or number. The…

Sixteen (16) male and sixteen (16) female fourth graders from disadvantaged backgrounds and from advantaged backgrounds were given the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) and the Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFFT), followed by a paired-associates task and a discrimination learning task. Results showed socioeconomic status…

Previous research has indicated that for discretely (paired associate) as well as continuously (sound-film) presented information, high arousal during acquisition results in poor immediate recall, but is characterized by a strong reminiscence effect. Low arousal learning results in better immediate recall with poor retention. The hypothesis that…

Subjects at three age levels were administered picture pair or word pair discrimination lists. They pronounced or pointed as a method of choice, and they pronounced or pointed at the correct item (or remained silent) during rehearsal. The results indicated that with picture pairs, pronunciation facilitated learning as a method of choice and a type…

Two views of paired-associate learning were examined by assessing the paired-associate learning efficiency of eighth grade samples identified by digit span and IQ test performance as Jensen-type Level I and Level II learners. Eighty eighth grade students ranging in age from 13 years 3 months to 14 years 10 months were selected as subjects. Three…