bigrams, were manipulated. It was found, as suspected, that there were differences in average productivity associated with different bigrams. Moreover, this difference in difficulty could be predicted in a rank-order sense given a knowledge of: (a) the pool size or number of English words actually beginning with a specified bigram, and (b) whether the bigram was composed of a vowel followed by a consonant (VC) or a consonant followed by a vowel (CV). Word production increased as a function of pool size and was generally greater for bigrams of the CV type. An interaction of the two variables, however, indicated that among bigrams of the VC type, production increased as a function of pool size between low and medium pools, but not between medium and great pools. Thus, for the VC bigrams, an increase in pool size beyond an intermediate level failed to facilitate production. The purpose of the research reported here was to explore the generality of these findings. First, an attempt was made to replicate the study discussed above using a differently defined group of human beings as Ss. It was hypothesized that the magnitude of mean responses to the various bigrams would decrease with a decrease in the age or grade of Ss, but that the relationships among the bigrams would remain the same. Subsequently a second word-fluency task was introduced for examination. The first-and-last-letter (FLL) task required that Ss write all the words they could that began and ended according to the letter combination given. It was predicted that production would be positively related to consonant structure of the given first letter and the pool size of the first-and-last-letter combination.
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