An experiment was designed to assess 2 methods of facilitating the acquistion of paired associates. Each of 96 3rd-and 96 6th-grade children was asked to learn a list of 24 pairs by a study-test method. The pairs were either pictures of objects or the printed names of those objects. As each pair was presented, the experimenter uttered 1 of 4 kinds of verbalization: (a) the names of the objects; (b) the names of the objects connected by a conjunction; (c) the names of the objects connected by a preposition; and, (d) the names of the objects connected by a verb. For both older and younger Ss, pictorial materials produced more efficient learning than printed materials and verb connectives uniformly facilitated acquisition. The relationship between connective form class and amount learned was such that verbs produced more learning than prepositions and prepositions produced more than conjunctions. The form of this relationship varied with materials and with grades.
A 4-way design was used to evaluate the facilitory effects of sentence verbalization and action depiction on the learning of paired associates by 1st-, 3rd-, and 6th-grade children from high-and low-strata schools. Each of a total of 432 Ss learned a list of 24 pictures of paired objects presented on movie film by a pairing-test procedure for 2 trials. The 1st of 2 experimental variables, Verbalization, concerned the type of verbal description given for the pairs (names, phrases, sentences). The 2nd experimental variable, Depiction, contrasted 2 kinds of pictorial representations of the pairs, one of which was a visual translation of the name and phrase descriptions (still) and the other of which was a visual translation of the sentence descriptions (action). The amount learned by older Ss was greater than that learned by younger Ss regardless of school strata. Sentence descriptions and action depiction facilitated learning for all Ss, and, in all conditions, low-strata children learned as efficiently as highstrata children.
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