Maintenance and generalization of a semantic rehearsal strategy in educable mentally retarded children

Two groups of 11- to 12-year-old educable mentally retarded children, equated on the basis of a free recall pretest, were given a series of lists for free recall. Approximately half the subjects were trained in the use of a strategy designed to induce deeper level semantic encoding and the discovery of categorical relationships and half constituted a “no-training” control group with standard free recall instructions. The subjects received either related or unrelated lists during the training phase and related or unrelated lists during two post-tests, immediately following and 1 week after training. There was evidence not only that the semantic strategy was maintained over the 1-week delay, but that it also generalized to word lists unlike those used during training. The degree of generalization was greater for those subjects receiving related lists during training.     

Does echoic memory develop?

A series of experiments is reported on the stimulus suffix effect with the primary variables being age of the subject (7 and 11 years), rate of presentation, and list length. While the suffix effect was larger for younger subjects at a slow rate of presentation, the effect was nearly identical across age groups with a fast presentation rate. It was concluded that when the contaminating effects of more central processes are reduced, there is no developmental change in the capacity of echoic memory. An interesting effect of rate of presentation is reported with younger subjects performing better at faster rates of presentation and adults performing better at slower rates.     

The effect of instruction with relational and item-specific elaborative strategies on young children's organization and free recall

One hundred and sixty second-grade children were assigned on the basis of a free recall pretest to four instruction conditions and were given a series of lists of pictures for free recall. For three groups, the instructions were directed at encoding either (a) list organizational information, (b) item-specific semantic information, or (c) organizational and individual item information, while the fourth group constituted a “No-training” control with standard free recall instructions. The subjects received either related or unrelated lists during the training phase and related or unrelated lists during two post-tests, immediately following and 1 week after training. For both types of lists, instructions emphasizing list organization were more effective than those emphasizing item-specific elaboration. Subjects given individual item elaborative instructions showed levels of recall which were comparable to those of the control subjects. While the combined effect of organizational and individual item processing did not exceed the performance produced by organizational instructions alone, the degree of generalization was greater for subjects processing both kinds of information, especially when subjects received related lists during training.     

Do developmental changes in digit span result from acquisition strategies?

This study tested the theoretical proposition that the developmental increase in memory span results from a corresponding increase in the use of grouping strategies. With slow presentation, experimenter-provided grouping eliminated the span differences between sixth graders and adults but, while grouping helped first graders more than adults, a sizable difference in digit span remained. With fast presentation, grouping increased the adults' performance more than the childrens'. Another finding was that both groups of children had greater digit spans with fast presentation than with slow. For adults, the reverse was true.     

A developmental study of the Prelinguistic Auditory Store (PAS)

Lists of digits 5 and 7 items in length were presented to second graders, sixth graders, and low-IQ sixth graders in either the visual or auditory modality. Half the auditory lists were followed by the redundant nonrecalled, auditorily presented word “recall” which served as a list suffix. The second graders had the most errors in the ordered recall task followed by the low-IQ sixth- and normal sixth-graders in that order. The size of the modality and suffix effects for the various groups seemed to indicate that, for the younger subjects, a larger proportion of the recall after auditory presentation comes from the Prelinguistic Auditory Store than for the older subjects.