TEMPORAL ORGANIZATION IN CHILDRENS STRATEGY FORMATION

It is well established that children use study behaviors such as card sorting, category naming, and item-by-item rehearsal to assist subsequ ent word recall. In this article, we provide evidence that these behav iors are organized into coherent temporal patterns. Fourier analyses o f individual behaviors over a sequence of five consecutive study/recal l trials indicated that sorting was synchronized with the start of eac h trial, whereas rehearsal tended to occur later in each trial. Fourie r analyses of pairs of behaviors indicated that sorting and category n aming, both concerned with categorization of the to-be-remembered word s, co-occurred early in each trial at a greater rate than expected bas ed on their individual frequencies of occurrence (i.e., they were used cooperatively). In contrast, verbal rehearsal of individual words co- occurred with both sorting and category naming at a lesser rate than w ould be expected based on their individual frequencies of occurrence. The results thus point to a global strategy in which children learn th e items' categories before they learn them individually. There was lit tle apparent qualitative difference in temporal organization for secon d- and fourth-grade children. However, sorting early in each trial was more pronounced for children with better word recall (regardless of g rade), and the suppressed co-occurrence of rehearsal with sorting and category naming (i.e., keeping category learning temporally separate f rom item learning) was more pronounced for the fourth-grade children. (C) 1998 Academic Press.