For more than two thousand years men have concerned themselves with the question of how ideas become associated or connected to one another. The concern here is primarily with the importance of the temporal order of associating independent elements with the common element and the direction of association between the independent elements and the common element in the verbal transfer situation. Several theories have been proposed which deal with the nature of mediated generalization, and though they differ somewhat as to the exact nature of the mediating process. From the standpoint of the subjects, this experiment appeared to involve a series of paired-associate learning problems. The subjects were required to learn two lists of words to a specified criterion, and were then tested on a third list for a fixed number of trials. Each list consisted of eight pairs of words, and the lists were constructed in such a way that the third list was composed of lour pairs which had a common associate in the first two lists and four pairs which had no such connection. The results of this investigation clearly establish the presence of generalization effects for all paradigms except one of the chaining models. In conclusion, this study has clearly established the presence of generalization effects with three chaining, two acquired stimulus equivalence, and two required response equivalence paradigms, and has strongly suggested the presence of several associative factors and indicated a need for further investigation of others. In addition, individual difference factors, such as task set and strategy, appear as important parameters in generalization and warrant further investigation.

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The first 50 stimuli from the K-R list, two personality tests (the MCI and the GZTS), and 26 verbal ability paper-and-pencil tests were given to a large number of senior high school students. Two response categories for the K-R, opposites and non-opposite primaries, and the personality tests had low correlations, most of which did not differ significantly from zero. This finding is consistent with that of previous investigators. The correlations between the K-R response classes and the 26 verbal tests, however, yielded different results. The non-opposite primaries tended to exhibit low positive (significant) correlations with the verbal tests, whereas the opposite scores showed essentially zero correlations with these same tests. These findings were interpreted as further supporting the contention that commonality scores do not represent a unitary verbal habit.

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