| Abstract: | First- and fourth-grade children, as well as adults, were given mnemonic instructions to image or to verbalize a sentence in order to study either a sentence or a noun pair provided aurally. Uninstructed control subjects also were included at each age level. A test of cued recall evaluated the amount of facilitation by mnemonic instruction in each of the groups. Both types of instruction enhanced children's memory, most notably when verbal pairs served as stimuli. However, whereas first graders under imagery instruction were inferior on pairs relative to sentence stimuli, fourth graders and adults recalled the two stimulus types equivalently. Also, whereas first graders performed at the same level on sentences and pairs under the verbalization instruction, fourth graders were superior on the pairs. These results indicate that greater requirements for subject-generated mediation to some degree penalized the younger subjects and benefited the older ones. |
