CHILDRENS ASSOCIATIVE LEARNING - AUTOMATIC AND DELIBERATE ENCODING OFMEANINGFUL ASSOCIATIONS

Three experiments were conducted examining 10- and 11-year-old childre n's deliberate and automatic encoding of meaningful associative relati onships on a paired-associate learning task. Subjects in Experiment 1 were presented pairs of related and unrelated words under deliberate m emorization and item-specific incidental-learning conditions. Cued-rec all performance was superior with related relative to unrelated pairs under both instructional conditions, suggesting that the encoding of a n association between items occurred automatically with meaningfully r elated words. In Experiment 2, it was found that execution of a verbal elaboration strategy required more time with unrelated than with rela ted pairs, suggesting greater ease of elaboration strategy execution w ith related materials. Experiment 3 monitored strategy use online usin g a think-aloud procedure. Cued-recall performance was superior with r elated pairs when subjects used rehearsal. In contrast, elaboration pr oduced equivalent levels of recall with both types of items, but subje cts executed the strategy successfully more often with related than wi th unrelated pairs. These findings are discussed in terms of the role of automatic processes and the effort demands of strategy execution in children's strategy use.