Cumulative Rehearsal Research Articles

Language Proficiency and the Prediction of Spontaneous Rehearsal in Children Who Are Deaf

This study was an investigation of the role of language proficiency and automatization of language skills in the use of spontaneous rehearsal strategies by children who are deaf. Thirty-one profoundly deaf children, 7 to 13 years old, were given a serial recall task, a test of language proficiency (the Language Proficiency Profile—I), and a rapid automatized naming (RAN) task. Similar to previous studies, when the data were examined by age, an apparent developmental lag was observed in the children's spontaneous use of a cumulative rehearsal strategy. Logistic regression analyses further demonstrated that age was actually a nonsignificant predictor of rehearsal use, but that both language proficiency and the automatization of language skills were highly significant predictors. In subsequent hierarchical analyses, automatized language was a partial mediator of the language proficiency → rehearsal use relation. These results provided support for the view that automatization of language skills is an important and perhaps necessary contribution to the relation between language proficiency and rehearsal use, but that other additional aspects of language proficiency also affect the child's use of a strategy. These findings were discussed in relation to Cummins’ (1984) model of language proficiency.

Visual versus verbal mnemonic training effects on memory‐deficient and language‐deficient subgroups of children with reading disability

This study compared the effectiveness of two different memory strategies for memory‐deficit, reading‐disabled (RD) children with different cognitive patterns. Forty learning‐disabled children 7 to 13 years old were divided into two groups based on whether they showed general language disorder (GLD) or specific memory disorder (SMD) without a language deficit. Each child was then given training in one of two memory strategies: visual mapping or cumulative verbal rehearsal. Subsequent memory performance of the two RD subgroups was compared over the two treatment conditions. There was a significant interaction in the effectiveness of the two treatments for the two groups’ memory performance after treatment. GLD children made significantly greater gains from pretesting to posttesting on the visual mapping treatment than on the cumulative verbal rehearsal treatment, whereas the SMD children demonstrated significantly greater gains on cumulative verbal rehearsal than on visual mapping. The findings suggest that...

Children's spontaneous rehearsal: Transitions in strategy acquisition

In three experiments, children's spontaneous rehearsal was examined under two conditions of item presentation using a within-subject design. Under “normal presentation” conditions, visually presented items were removed from view after their initial presentation. In contrast, under “items-available presentation” conditions, all items remained visible after their initial presentation, a procedure designed to minimize the processing demands of cumulative, multi-item rehearsal. It was found in Experiments 1 and 2 that children who utilized a multi-item rehearsal strategy under normal presentation conditions rehearsed with even larger multi-item rehearsal sets with items available. Of the children who used a single-word strategy under normal conditions, approximately 70% rehearsed single words with items available (“single-word rehearsers”), whereas approximately 30% rehearsed cumulatively with items available (“transitional rehearsers”). In a third experiment, we retested some of the children from Experiment 2 one year after their initial testing. We found that most of the children previously classified as transitional, but not those who had consistently rehearsed single words, had advanced to using a cumulative rehearsal strategy under normal presentation conditions.

The mental effort requirement of cumulative rehearsal: A developmental study

Three experiments were conducted examining the relationship between the mental effort requirement of cumulative rehearsal and spontaneous utilization of the strategy by children. Mental effort was assessed by measuring the interference produced by cumulative rehearsal with a simultaneously performed secondary task (finger-tapping). It was found in Experiment 1 that second- and third-grade children experienced significantly more finger-tapping interference during instructed cumulative rehearsal than did sixth-grade children, an effect which, Experiment 2 demonstrated, could not be attributed simply to developmental differences in time-sharing performance. In Experiment 3 it was found that, for children in grades 2 through 5, rehearsal set size during spontaneous rehearsal was negatively correlated with amount of finger-tapping interference during instructed cumulative rehearsal, suggesting that spontaneous use of a cumulative rehearsal strategy was negatively correlated with the mental effort requirement of strategy use. These findings support the view that the mental effort requirement of strategy use may influence children's strategy selection on memory tasks.

UNDERSTANDING THE PURPOSE OF STRATEGY TRAINING

Summary. Two groups of retarded adults were trained to use a cumulative rehearsal strategy for a serial recall task. Those subjects who received instructions which emphasised the intended purpose and potential uses of the trained strategy showed significantly better serial recall performance than subjects invited to participate in ‘a remembering task’. The superiority in serial recall performance was present up to one week after training ceased. The results are discussed in terms of the role of executive, or metacognitive, skills in the facilitation of transfer.

Developmental Changes in the Effects of Instructions on Production-deficient Children

BRAY, NORMAN W.; JUSTICE, ELAINE M.; FERGUSON, ROBERT P.; and SIMON, DEBORAH L. Developmental Changes in the Effects of Instructions on Production-deficient Children. Cmum DEVELOPMENT, 1977, 48, 1019-1026. Firstand third-grade children were tested under 6 different instruction conditions which varied in how explicitly they cued a rehearsal strategy in a self-paced sequential-memory task. The type of strategy adopted was monitored with study time and overt verbalization measures. Instructions to either look, remember, label, or say the picture names over and over did not prime the use of cumulative rehearsal. Modeling of cumulative rehearsal was necessary for the younger children, whereas cumulative-rehearsal instructions were sufficient for the older children. Since both age groups were production deficient on this task, the results illustrate that production deficiencies are not all-or-none phenomena and that they are dependent on particular task conditions.

Short-term memory in deaf and hearing children in relation to stimulus characteristics

Experiment 1 examined short-term memory with a serial probe task in 20 younger (mean age: 6 years, 3 months) and 20 older (mean age: 8 years, 8 months) deaf children. Four sets of stimuli were used: familiar animals, unfamiliar nonsense forms, fingerspelled letters, and lower-case print. In contrast to earlier research with hearing children, strong primacy effects were found with all stimuli at both ages, with frequent gestural and/or oral labeling but little cumulative rehearsal evident. To determine whether results were uniquely tied to deafness, identical procedures were used in Experiment 2 with 20 younger (4 years, 9 months) and 20 older (5 years, 10 months) hearing children. Again, overt activity was common, with strong primacy effects on animals and nonsense forms in the older group and on animals in the younger group. Contrasts between present and earlier findings suggest the need to consider the degree to which stimulus labels are overlearned, the role of nonverbal mediators in rehearsal, and the effects of changing educational experiences.

REHEARSAL SPAN VERSUS MEMORY SPAN: WHAT DOES THIS COMPARISON TELL US ABOUT VERBAL MEMORY?

In the rehearsal span (RS) task the subject is presented with a series of items such that each new item is presented only after he has repeated all the preceding items in the correct order. Contrary to the results reported by Dalrymple‐Alford (1967), it was found (a) that the maximum number of digits, on average, a subject could repeat back under these conditions (the rehearsal span) was significantly greater than the conventional memory span (MS); and (b) that recall of early items in the series benefited from the cumulative rehearsal in the RS task. In addition, ordered free recall of RS series was superior to that of MS series. Presentation rate had no significant effect on the magnitude of any of the above differences between performance in the RS task and that in the MS task. These results do not support previous conclusions, based on the failure to observe any difference between MS and RS, about the role of rehearsal in short‐term verbal memory.

The use of the cumulative rehearsal strategy: A developmental study

This study was designed to address two issues: (1) At what age do children spontaneously use a cumulative rehearsal strategy; and (2) What effect does the use of the strategy have on their performance? Twenty-eight children at each of five grade levels (nursery, kindergarten, 1, 3, and 5) were tested in a serial-position recall task. Stimuli were pictures of common objects and animals whose labels were one or two syllables in length. Following testing, the children were asked to report the memory strategy they had used. The assumption was made that children who were using a cumulative rehearsal strategy would perform better on series of one-syllable items than on series of two-syllable items. As predicted, nursery, kindergarten, and first-grade subjects correctly recalled as many two-syllable as one-syllable items: Both third- and fifth-graders recalled significantly more one-syllable than two-syllable items. Results indicated that (1) young children do not spontaneously use a cumulative rehearsal strategy until after first grade, and (2) the use of rehearsal did not facilitate overall performance of the rehearsers relative to the nonrehearsers at any grade level. Results are discussed in terms of their theoretical implications for the study of memory development.

The phonetic effect in preschool children: The influence of overt rehearsal and verbal instructions

Preschoolers' serial matching of picture lists composed of either phonetically similar or unrelated items was compared under three types of conditions. The lower retention of phonetic lists had been used as an index of verbal mediation by Conrad (1971, 1972) who found that preschoolers did not show differential retention, and hence no verbal encoding, even when they were required to label overtly. This result was replicated and also obtained in a condition which emphasized the verbal aspects of the task. However, a significant phonetic effect and higher overall retention resulted from a condition which required overt, cumulative rehearsal. Alternative interpretations of the influence of rehearsal on the phonetic effect were offered.

Analysis of memory codes and cumulative rehearsal in observational learning

The present study examined the influence of memory codes varying in meaningfulness and retrievability and cumulative rehearsal on retention of observationally learned responses over increasing temporal intervals. Symbolic codes combining meaningfulness with retrievability produced superior memory performances, but responses were poorly retained in symbolic representations containing only one of these properties. Individual response analysis further confirmed that the more meaningful the codes incorporating retrieval guides the better are modeled responses learned and retained. Cumulative rehearsal had differential effects on memory performances depending upon the serial input position of the responses and the form into which the modeled behavior was encoded. Code rehearsals facilitated retention of early and intermediate responses which were repeated more than later ones, but this was true mainly for codes vulnerable to loss. The overall findings provide further corroborative evidence that memory performances are governed more by information coding than by associative strengthening processes.

Controlled forgetting in the retarded

Three experiments investigated selective rehearsal by retardates in a serial memory task which was an adaptation of Bjork's (1970) paradigm involving instructions to forget a subset of the material presented. Since previous research indicated that retarded children do not selectively rehearse, and since Bjork's paradigm requires the use of a selective rehearsal strategy, it seemed likely that retardates would fail in this task. Experiment 1 showed that retardates could perform this task, and there was substantial evidence for cumulative rehearsal. The possibility of an averaging artifact in the data of Expt 1 was eliminated in Expt 2 by showing evidence of primacy and facilitation due to the forget instruction for individual Ss. Experiment 3 indicated that the facilitation due to the forget instruction was likely due to the effective use of a selective rehearsal strategy. These results contrast with other findings of no rehearsal in retarded children. It is suggested that response biases may be involved in previous studies of rehearsal.

Mnemonic elaboration in multilist learning

This study inquires whether retroactive interference (RI) from learning multiple word lists can be altered through mnemonic strategies. The S s learned five successive lists of 20 words each by associating the words with 20 conceptual pegs via visual imagery. Some S s were instructed to visualize the words from the successive lists in entirely new associative scenes; other S s were to incorporate the current list's words into the appropriate scenes from the earlier lists. Although equivalent in immediate recall, the Separate Images (SI) group recalled less than the Progressive Elaboration (PE) group at the end of the session, and showed a strict RI curve across lists where the PE group did not. Recall at a one-week test, however, favored earlier lists for the PE group only, explicable in terms of cumulative rehearsal of earlier items with the PE method.