Abstract
A total of 68 undergraduates intentionally learned a list of Italian nouns and the correspondent Japanese nouns twice under the same (same-context repetition condition) or different (different-context repetition condition) contexts with a one-day (Experiment 1) or one-week (Experiment 2) inter-repetition interval. One day (Experiment 1) or one week (Experiment 2) after the second learning of the list, the participants received a written free-recall test for the list under the third neutral context. In Experiment 1, participants learned the list in a large classroom in a group or in a narrow booth alone. In Experiment 2, participants learned the list in a large classroom in a group or in their home alone. Experiment 1 yielded no difference in recall between SCR and DCR conditions. Experiment 2 yielded the superiority of DCR to SCR conditions. The present results suggest that larger difference in contexts produces the contextual variability effects in paired-associate learning.
