Children's associative learning: automatic and deliberate encoding of meaningful associations

Three experiments were conducted examining 10- and 11-year-old children's deliberate and automatic encoding of meaningful associative relationships on a paired-associate learning task. Subjects in Experiment 1 were presented pairs of related and unrelated words under deliberate memorization and item-specific incidental-learning conditions. Cued-recall performance was superior with related relative to unrelated pairs under both instructional conditions, suggesting that the encoding of an association between items occurred automatically with meaningfully related words. In Experiment 2, it was found that execution of a verbal elaboration strategy required more time with unrelated than with related pairs, suggesting greater ease of elaboration strategy execution with related materials. Experiment 3 monitored strategy use online using a think-aloud procedure. Cued-recall performance was superior with related pairs when subjects used rehearsal. In contrast, elaboration produced equivalent levels of recall with both types of items, but subjects executed the strategy successfully more often with related than with unrelated pairs. These findings are discussed in terms of the role of automatic processes and the effort demands of strategy execution in children's strategy use.