
Document Type
Thesis
Date of Award
1981
Abstract
Recent studies (Jacoby, 1978; McFarland, Frey, and Rhodes, 1980; Slamecka and Graf, 1978) have shown a significant increase in retention of words when a stimulus is generated by an adult subject as opposed to being provided by the experimenter. This phenomenon has emerged in a variety of testing situations, following various encoding orientations, and is present both immediately following learning and after a 24-hour delay. The purpose of the present experiment is to determine if the generation effect is present in children and the degree to which it elaborates the quality of the stimulus event beyond the influence of processing level and within the context of different retention tests. Specifically, retention of subject-versus experimenter-generated items given a semantic or phonemic encoding environment was studied across second, third, fifth, and seventh graders. The phonemic task required the subjects to produce either a word beginning with a specified initial letter that rhymes with a presented word, or to read from the card a second word that rhymes with the first presented word. The semantic task required the subject to produce a member of an identified category beginning with a specified initial letter or to read from the card a member of the specified category. For both the phonemically- and semantically-encoded conditions, recall or recognition of the second word was tested.
Recommended Citation
Bruno, Jan Marie, "Developing Aspects of Memory for Internally- Versus Externally- Generated Stimuli." (1981). All ETDs from UAB. 6959.
https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/etd-collection/6959
Comments
MA - Master of Arts; ProQuest publication number 31751879