This paper is a draft for the American Psychological Association Symposium on the conditioning of verbal behavior and attitudes. The author presents the results of several studies he conducted in the classical conditioning of meaning and attitude. These studies attempt to control the measurement effects created by extraneous variables operating on…

The primary purpose for conducting the present experiment was to assess the effects of an associative-attribute--for example, stimulus meaningfulness (m) on the learning rates of different age group children. An attempt was also made to assess the effects of age and m on a measure of subjective organization. This research consisted of two studies:…

Verbal analogy items, consisting of an ambiguous stimulus word pair and two unambiguous response word pairs as choice alternatives, were presented to psychology students in a counterbalanced design to discover if preferences existed between the two competing relations in each item. The data were analyzed to see if these preferences ordered…

The essays included in this periodical focus on teaching elementary school children how to appreciate and how to write poetry. "Children, Poetry, and Memorization," by J.F.S. Smeall, outlines the historical basis, and perceptual limitations, of the use of print media alone in classroom instruction. Suggestions for encouraging children's recitation…

The mnemonic consequences of semantic, acoustic, and orthographic encoding and the relationships between encoding and retrieval cues were investigated in an incidental-learning experiment involving 24 first-, third-, and fifth-grade pupils. Each child was asked one orienting question for each of 18 words; the questions differed in the type of…

Twenty 3-year-old, home reared, Down's Syndrome children and eight 3-year-old normal children were studied to examine the verbal learning characteristics of Down's Syndrome children in typical preschool learning tasks. Prior to the study, research on characteristics of verbal learning deficits in retarded individuals and on verbal skill training…

The purpose of this study was to investigate and compare the patterns of psycholinguistic abilities of lower and middle class Negro and white children. The subjects for the study were 160 second grade children in the 90 to 110 IQ range from Northeast Louisiana. They were subgrouped by race and social class (lower-lower, upper-lower, lower-middle,…

This research evaluated the total-time hypothesis for the learning of connected discourse--that in verbal learning "a fixed amount of time is necessary to learn a fixed amount of material regardless of the number of individual trials into which that time is divided." Learning material consisted of two sets of connected discourse for each of the…

A study of the extent to which relationships exist between pupils' verbal associative learning ability and seven indices of pupil ability to verbalize utilized 32 third-grade and 34 fifth-grade pupils randomly selected from six Las Cruces schools. Raw data were collected from transcribed language samples, the Verbal Paired-Associate Test, the…

To investigate organizational strategies of educable mentally retarded (EMR) and normal boys, the performance of 30 normal boys (mean IQ 105.1) and 30 EMR boys (mean IQ 69.9), ages 7-12 years, was compared on various free recall learning tasks. Three measures of input organization employed were category clustering, associative clustering, and…

Forty preschool Negro children took part in a study to test the effect of oral response versus listening in improving the spoken language of disadvantaged children. It was hypothesized that children who echo and produce sentences in response to an instruction to select the appropriate picture to match a spoken sentence would show greater verbal…

The influence of two aspects of language structure, syntax and associativity, on the free recall of verbal messages was investigated. (Syntax refers to the rules for ordering words within sentences; associativity refers to the network of meaningful relationships which exist among words in a language.) Twenty-four children from each of grades…

After opening with a 13-page review of the literature, the document's main emphasis is on the three experiments included in this report. The specific rationale, procedures, and results of the three studies comprise the major portion of the document. The general purpose of Experiment 1 was to ascertain the effects of prior relevant subject matter…

The purpose of the experiment was to test the prediction that non-specific facilitated learning of a second prose passage will occur in the situation where an initial passage read by the subjects contained concrete referents designed to increase the comprehension of a difficult to understand second passage. Two-hundred and forty subjects…

Children in kindergarten, third grade, and fifth grade were presented a list of either pictures or words (with items presented varying numbers of times on the study trail). In both picture and word conditions, half of the subjects estimated how many times each item had been presented (absolute judgments) and the other half judged which of two…