Children were presented with a related-word triplet (horse, pig, cow) with or without accompanying setting, or place, information (farm). Children were later given a retrieval cue from the first two words of the triplet and asked to recall the third word. Found that place information presented at acquisition and retrieval facilitated children's…

Examined children's modification of their own retrieval processes in a cued recall task. Results suggested that monitoring and modification of retrieval processes should be distinguished and that monitoring is necessary but not sufficient for induction of an effective retrieval strategy. Results also had implications for understanding children's…

In a visual memory task, two degrees of stimulus detail were compared to test Reese's hypothesis that stimulus detail would facilitate retention of paired associates for young children. Forty 4-year-olds and forty 5-year-olds were tested to assess reported trend that elaboration facilitates retention for older children. (JH)

This experiment assessed interactions between encoding and retrieval strategies in recall. Three levels of encoding conditions (random, blocked,sort) and three types of retrieval conditions (free, cued, constrained) were examined at three age levels (6, 10, and 18 years). (CM)

Examines children's ability to make both logical and pragmatic presuppositional inferences and to discriminate between the two as a function of contextual information. Five- and eight-year-old children served as subjects. (BD)

Examines first- and third-grade children and college adults' ability to make excuse inferences about a speaker's use of an utterance and to modify those inferences appropriately upon receiving later information. Possible reasons for children's inflexibility were examined by varying the difficulty of relating the excuse interpretation and…

Examines hypothesis that lack of structural constraint limits children's ability to use context and category cues to search associative memory for episodic information. Second- and fifth-graders and college adults were shown word triplets and asked to recall the final target member of each triplet in a cued recall task. (Author/BE)

Four experiments were conducted to extend the "descriptions" approach to differences in using retrieval cues among second and fourth graders and college adults. Results indicate that deficits in discriminability and constructability contribute independently to developmental differences in using retrieval cues and suggest reasons for such deficits.…

Used four experiments to examine retrieval access and item-by-item search processes and strategies in the cued recall of children in grades 3 and 6, and of adults. Results suggested that retrieval access is a problem for young children and contributes strongly to developmental increases in recall. Adults used retrieval strategies, although search…

Four experiments examined the contribution of item-by-item retrieval search processes to developmental differences in cued recall. Results indicated that developmental cued recall differences remained even when access, constraint, search object, and knowledge base problems were controlled or minimized. (SKC)

Six experiments examined the problems third graders, sixth graders, and college students had in gaining access to episodic information while retrieving information from memory. Results suggested that conceptual access problems vary with grade and that elaboration of the representation of an episode facilitates access. (Author/SKC)

Five experiments examined the cued recall of the last target words of primarily four-word (Bus-Airplane-Car-Train) category stimuli by children and adults. Focused on problems of gaining access to episodic search sets in recall. Results suggested that access to search set is more problematic for children than for adults. (RWB)

Results suggest that children can use the rules of conversational sequencing to evaluate the need for an inference to the speaker's intent when speakers deliberately violate a rule. This ability is acquired by six or seven years of age, but children do not correctly infer the speaker's intent until they are eight or nine years old. (Author/RH)

Adjective noun-noun word triplets were presented in an acquisition encoding context to second and fourth graders and college students to determine if they were compatible with trace information in memory and change with age. (HOD)

Presents five experiments that examine the ability of first graders, fourth graders, and adults to make causal inferences that explain how an unexpected and inconsistent "outcome" follows from an initial premise in a story. Results indicate that referential and causal coherence are empirically separable and should be distinguished theoretically.…