RESOURCE REQUIREMENTS OF KNOWLEDGE ACCESS AND RECALL BENEFITS OF ASSOCIATIVE STRATEGIES

The present studies examined the relationships between knowledge-base access for elaborative events, children's strategy use, and recall. Ol der children (grades four and five) and young adolescents (grades seve n and eight) learned a mixed list of noun pairs that varied in knowled ge-base access (accessible vs inaccessible). Subjects were instructed to generate sentences aloud (Experiment 1) or describe visual images a loud (Experiment 2) for each pair on study trials. Results showed that the pair descriptions could be reliably classified into the categorie s of Elaboration and Other Associative Strategies identified by Beuhri ng and Kee (1987). Overall, subjects made greater use of Other Associa tive Strategies than Elaboration. Sentence/image descriptions were mor e rapid for accessible than for inaccessible pairs and this difference was largest when subjects used Other Associative Strategies in contra st to Elaboration. For recall, on the other hand, the typical advantag e of accessible pairs over inaccessible pairs was observed when subjec ts used Other Associative Strategies, but not Elaboration. Results als o suggested an influence of the knowledge base on pair retrieval durin g cued recall (cue-offset to correct response onset): Subjects require d less time to retrieve correct associates for accessible pairs than i naccessible pairs. The findings are discussed in terms of the effects of the resource demands of strategy use on the speed and effectiveness of strategy execution. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.