This study explored the developmental changes in children's effective utilization of verbal versus pictorial stimuli in forming connections between stimulus and response elements in a paired-associate task. A total of 112 children (56 males and 56 females), half of them 4-year-olds and half 8-year-olds, were tested under eight conditions involving three variables. The first variable was mode of study, which was either a pictorial or a verbal original presentation of the items. The second variable was mode of test, which was either a pictorial or a verbal presentation of the test items. The third variable was the presence or absence of a mnemonic on the original trials. The mnemonic was either a sentence or an interaction picture combining the elements of each pair. In all conditions, each pair contained an animal as a stimulus term and a common object as a response term. Within-list and extra-list distractor pairs were used on the test trials. Results showed that 4-year-old and 8-year-old children performed significantly better with a mnemonic than without one. After a visual study trial, younger children had difficulty performing on a verbal recognition test but performed better on a pictorial recognition test. The performance of 8-year-olds showed no significant differences for test mode or study mode. (Author/BRT)