Interactive effects of age and familiarization in paired-associate learning.

Prior to learning a list of paired associates consisting of pictures of common objects, 40 preschool and 40 2nd graders were given 1 of 4 familiarization conditions: stimulus pretraining, response pretraining, irrelevant pretraining, and no pretraining. Results show that the 2nd graders exhibited positive transfer from familiarization to paired-associate learning due to nonspecific factors such as "warm-up." The preschoolers, however, displayed positive transfer due to more specific factors inherent in response and stimulus pretraining. These results suggest that the pretraining experience facilitated rehearsal by making available verbal labels. Results are consistent with (a) developmental hypotheses that emphasize growth in discriminative capacity and/or verbal mediation and (b) phase theories of paired-associate learning that emphasize stimulus and response learning stages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)