THE EFFECT OF CONTEXTUAL EXPERIENCES ON VERBAL MEMORY IN CHILDREN

Abstract

The present study was designed to examine the effect of contextual experiences which involved stimulus words (S) in relation to response words (R) on their paired-associate learning.
In experiment I, 144 Ss, recruited from fifth grade children in junior school, were assigned equally to four experimental conditions. The Ss in group I composed sentences, the Ss in group II read short sentences, the Ss in group II read long sentences, which involved each pair of S and R, and the Ss in group IV (control group) had no contextual experience.Following each contextual experience, Ss learned S-R paired list in five trials.
The results are summarized as follows: The facilitation effect of contextual experiences were observed in terms of the number of correct responses in paired-associate learning.The effect of composition (group I) was the highest one in all and the effect of reading (group I & II) was next, but the difference in performance between short sentences (group II) and long sentences (group II) was not significant.
Experiment I was conducted to test whether the effect of reading the sentence is contextual one or not.The Ss, 126 fifth grade children in junior school, divided equally to three groups.The Ss in group I had the same contextual experience as group in Exp.I, the Ss in group II read S and R II separately, the Ss in group II (control group) had no contextual experience, and followed by paired? associate learning.
The results are summarized as follows: The facilitation effect of composition (group II) was observed in terms of the number of correct responses in paired-associate learning, but the effect of reading S and R separately was not observed.
In both Exp.I and Exp.II, the IQ of children had an effect on achievement in learning but did not determine the effect of contextual experiences.