Preschoolers and children in Grades K and 1 were given five study-recall trials with either categorizable blocked, categorizable unblocked, or uncategorizable word lists. A significant triple interaction reflected a list type effect that occurred only for the school children, and then only on later trials. The preschoolers showed no effect of categorizability, whereas the school children's recall on the final three trials was higher in the categorizable blocked than in the remaining conditions.A number of previous experiments have shown that school children, like adults, recall more items from taxonomically categorizable word lists than from uncategorizable lists. Further, this difference is greater when the category members are blocked during presentation than when they are distributed through the list. Although one might also expect the facilitation effect of categorizability to increase with age, as suggested by Keppel (1964), such an Age by Ust Type interaction typically has not been found in school children. All three of the above fmdings were reported in a series of experiments by Cole, Frankel, and Sharp (1971) in which multitrial free recall of 20 familiar nouns was examined. In one study the nouns consisted of five members of each of four categories, presented either in a blocked or an unblocked fashion to children in Grades 1, 3, and 8. Performance improved with age and trials and was better with blocked presentation, but the expected Age by Ust Type interaction was not found. Nor was it found in a subsequent experiment when either an unblocked categorizable or an uncategorizable list was administered to children in Grades 1, 4,6, and 9.Why has the Age by Relatedness interaction not been found in such experiments? Surely the ability of children to capitalize on such interitem relationships does not peak by age 7 or 8 years (see, for example, studies by Moely, Olson, Halwes, & Flavell, 1969;Neimark, Slotnick, & Ulrich, 1972; Ornstein, Naus, & Uberty, 1975). This apparent incongruity is resolved if we assume that by age 7 or 8 years the rate of development of more effective processes for the recall of socalled unrelated words is roughly equivalent to the rate of development of more effective processes for the recall of categorizable information. (In fact, the fundamental processes involved may be identical, or nearly so, although that possibility cannot be confirmed at this time.) If so, then the unrelated condition is an inappropriate baseline against which to measure developmental changes in the effectiveness of processing related items, i.e., the prediction of an Age by Relatedness interaction no longer is sensible for that particular age range. That interaction, however, would be expected when the youngest subjects examined are at a point of not yet deriving any advantage from the existence of such interitem relationships, and when the oldest subjects are 7 years or older.Following the above reasoning, the present experiment examined the effects of list categorizability on the multitrial free recall...