This study investigated the spontaneous use of verbal mediators in discrimination learning, the transfer of mediators to a free recall task, and the effects of a pretraining task on performance. The discrimination tasks required nursery school children (80) to: (1) sort three instances each of two different concepts in a conceptually consistent fashion, (2) sort three conceptually-related and three unrelated stimuli into groups, and (3) sort six unrelated stimuli into two predefined groups. The results indicated that the subjects spontaneously utilized the conceptual mediators on the discrimination task. However, they did not use them together with alternate discriminative cues present in the list. The subjects also transferred the mediators to the free recall task (where recall for conceptually related items was greater for conceptually--related than for unrelated items). Pretraining facilitated discrimination learning but had no effect on recall. (Author/SET)