Developmental differences in remembering sentences after integrative or selective semantic processing

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Abstract

Fifth graders (age: 10 years) and college undergraduates performed one of four different semantic orienting activities on a series of agent-action-object sentences. Afterwards all subjects received a memory test combining recognition for whole sentences with cued recall for component agents, actions, and objects. Overall levels of both recall and recognition varied with the orienting activities. Relative recallability of agents, actions, and objects varied with orienting activity as well. Recognition performance improved with grade level but recall did not. The interaction between type of memory test and grade level was taken to indicate that organization of material in memory increases during adolescence even when the total amount of material stored does not.

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  • This research was supported by NICHHD program-project Grant 5P01-HD00973 to George Peabody College and NIH postdoctoral Fellowship 1-F32-HD05157 from NICHHD to the first author.

    We would like to thank the students, parents, and faculty of St. Edward's School, Nashville Diocese Catholic Schools, for their cooperation and participation, and Thomas Killion, Douglas Hintzman, Ray Hyman, Benson Schaeffer, and three anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and criticisms.

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