Effect of varying picture-sentence congruence on children's free recall

70 fourth-grade children were shown objects arbitrarily arranged in an integrated scene. Subjects were randomly assigned to conditions which either presented a sentence that correctly labeled and correctly described the physical arrangement of the objects, presented a sentence containing the correct labels of the objects but not the correct physical arrangement, or presented a sentence which did not contain the correct labels and incorrectly described the physical arrangement. Control conditions either provided subjects with correct labels or omitted presentation of verbal prompts. Congruence between the object display and the sentence produced significantly higher recall and clustering than the incongruence or control conditions. The incongruence conditions did not produce significantly higher recall than the control conditions, suggesting that incongruence interferes with formation of stable grouping of items which appears to be an important factor in facilitating free recall.