Studies of distributed practice: XVIII. The influence of meaningfulness and intralist similarity of serial nonsense lists.

Effects of Massed and Distributed Practice on the Learning and Retention of Second-Language Vocabulary

“…Conceptually, for ex ample , it makes sense to think about the acquisition of a t ask to a certain level of proficiency and the forgetting of the task once that level of proficiency has been reached as separate aspects of the overall concern for learning and memory. Empirically, many variables that have sizable effects on rate of learning appear to have very little, if any , effect on rate of forgetting when variables known to affe ct rate of forgetting (e.g., degree of original learning) are taken into account (Olton, 1969;Postman & Bums, 1973 ;Shuell & Keppel, 1970;Shull & Lee, 1976;Underwood & Richardson, 1958).…”

The Psychology of Language

“…It has been repeatedly shown that meaningfulness affects the rate of paired-associate learning and that the meaningfulness of the response term is more important than the meaningfulness of the stimulus term (Mandler and Campbell, 1957;Cieutat, Stockwell, and Noble, 1958;Jantz and Underwood, 1958;Hunt, 1959). In serial learning, meaningfulness interacts with intertrial interval; the less meaningful the material, the more important it is that practice be distributed (Braun and Heymann, 1958;Underwood and Richardson, 1958;Ellis, 1960). Stimulus position (Vinacke and Smith, 1959) and motivating instructions (Sarason, 1957) also interact with meaningfulness in serial learning.…”

Effects of Massed, Distributed, and Spaced Trial Sequencing on Severely Handicapped Students' Performance

“…Underwood and colleagues (Underwood, 1953;Underwood & Goad, 1951;Underwood et al, 1976) demonstrated that college students' learning of nonsense syllables was signifi cantly superior under a distributed condition versus a massed condition as a function of intralist similarity. The more difficult the list, the more the distributed practice condition facilitated learning.…”

“…This has been demonstrated primarily for nonfunctional cognitive and motor tasks both with handicapped and nonhandicapped individuals. The cognitive tasks used to demonstrate this effect are reading (Gargagliano,Note 2), learning nonsense words or syllables (Hovland, 1940a(Hovland, , 1940b, and paired associate learn ing of words (Dent & Johnson, 1964;Hovland, 1939;Madsen, 1963;Underwood & Goad, 1951). The motor tasks used are a self-help "shirt on" task and scann ing task (Helmstetter,Note 3), gross motor stability (Chasey, 1976;Stelmach, 1969), fine motor rotary pursuit (Adams, 1952;Duncan, 1951;Kimble, 1949a;Reynolds & Adams, 1953), and fine motor manipula tion of pegs (Caron, 1969;Kimble & Bilodeau, 1949).…”

“…Underwood and Goad (1951) taught lists of similar and dissimilar adjectives under conditions of spaced and massed practice. They found no difference in learn ing for dissimilar lists, while there was a differential effect in favor of spaced trials for similar lists.…”