The relation between item identification difficulty and elaborative conceptual processing for children and adults

JOURNAL

OF EXPERIMENTAL

CHILD

PSYCHOLOGY

49, 399-427 (1990)

The Relation between Item Identification Difficulty and Elaborative Conceptual Processing for Children and Adults BRIAN P. ACKERMAN,

DARA SILVER,

University

AND LAURA

SCOBEY

of Delaware

The four experiments concerned the relation between the difficulty of item identification processes, elaborative conceptual processing, and developmental differences in cued recall. Elaborative conceptual processing was manipulated by asking related (“How many are related?“), category (“How many are vehicles?“), and analytic (“How many usually carry freight?“) orienting questions about four-word stimuli in which the words were categorically related (BusAirplane-Car-Train). The measures of elaborative processing were the speed and accuracy of question answers. Cued recall for the targets (Train) was assessed for one-word (Bus) or two-word (Bus-Airplane) cues, which were varied to determine if elaborative processing affected cue discriminability or constructability, or both. The difficulty of item identification was varied in several ways. In Experiment 1, the graphemic information was degraded in the acquisition stimuli, or the retrieval cues, or the stimulus words were intact. In Experiments 2 and 3, acquisition presentation time was varied and the stimuli were read by the experimenter or the subject. Experiment 4 featured pictures to determine generalizability. The results showed that elaborative conceptual processing facilitates recall. Most important, item identification processes limit elaborative conceptual processing for both words and pictures, and more for children than for college students. 0 1’590 Academic Press. Inc.

For both children and adults, recall usually varies with the elaborative processing of the conceptual information in a stimulus (cf. Craik & Jacoby, 1979). Elaborative processing generally has been associated with the extent of processing at acquisition, and with the distinctiveness and discriminability of the stimulus representation during retrieval (Ackerman, 1987; Jacoby & Craik. 1979; Jacoby, Craik, & Begg, 1979). Similarly, elaborative processing usually is associated with variations in processing effort, which often affect recall and recognition (Hasher & Zacks, We thank the children and staffs of Leasure, Etta Smith, Pulaski, and Drew/Pyle Elementary Schools. We also thank the undergraduates who contributed to this research, especially Kathy Spiker. Please address reprint requests to Brain Ackerman, Department of Psychology, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716. 399 0022-0965/90 $3.00 Copyright 0 1990 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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1979; McDaniel, Einstein, Dunay, & Cobb, 1986; Zacks, Hasher, Sanft, & Rose, 1983). The effects may be found in a variety of task contexts. including the generation task for both adults (Graf, 1982; Graf & Levy, 1984) and children (McFarland, Duncan, & Bruno, 1983), a variety of cued recall tasks for children (Ackerman, 1987; Ackerman & Bailey, 1989; Ackerman, Spiker, & Bailey, 1989), and in children’s use of encoding strategies in free recall tasks (Bjorklund, 1987. 1988; Chi & Ceci, 1987, Ornstein & Naus, 1985). Differences in elaborative conceptual processing also may contribute to developmental increases in recall. The supporting evidence is abundant, usually involving demonstrations of reduced developmental recall differences when elaborative processing is enhanced in children or limited in adults (Ackerman, 1985, 1987). What is unknown is what limits the elaborative processing of children. One possibility concerns concept identification, which includes processing the sensory information in an item and core aspects of conceptual information sufficient to classify the item. To the extent that elaborative conceptual processing involves interitem or relational information in a stimulus, problems in identifying individual items will limit elaborative processing. The limitation may affect both the discriminability and constructability of cue information in recall (cf. Ackerman, 1987), since both may reflect elaboration of interitem relations. Discriminability primarily concerns acquisition processes that ensure that cue information is uniquely linked to a specific target item in memory. Constructability concerns using a cue to reinstate the acquisition encoding context at retrieval. The effects may occur for both cued recall and free recall to the extent that the latter involves self-generated cues, and may be greater for children than for adults because the efficiency of item identification increases with age. Ackerman et al. (1989) provide support for these ideas by showing a relation between the difficulty of graphemic processing (i.e., reading) and the elaborative processing of interitem information in stimuli. Other support is provided by Bjorklund and Harnishfeger (1987) who suggest that children’s inefficiency in processing item information limits their strategic processing of interitem relations. Similarly, Rabinowitz and Chi (1987) and Chi and Ceci (1987) argue that concept activation processes limit children’s encoding strategies. However, these studies are inconclusive for a number of reasons. One is that the studies focused on acquisition processes but ignored retrieval. and it is unknown if constraints on the elaboration of cue information affect retrieval. In addition, all the studies concerned the constraints on the use of acquisition encoding strategies, and it remains to be determined if more fundamental nonstrategic processes are limited as well. A third reason is that previous studies have not employed direct measures of

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elaborative processing that are shown to vary with the difficulty of concept identification processes. Bjorklund and Harnishfeger (1987) and Ackerman and Bailey (1989), for example, used divided attention tasks that clearly disrupted acquisition processes, but the disruption was not specifically linked to elaboration. Thus, the disruption could have affected any aspect of acquisition, and could have been mediated by a number of mechanisms, including motor competition as pointed out by Brainerd and Reyna (1989). Fourth, the aspects of elaboration that are limited for children primarily seem to involve the processing of superordinate category information, at least as established by Bjorklund and Harnishfeger (1987) and Chi and Ceci (1987). Yet Ackerman and Bailey (1989) provide evidence that the processing of category information is not resource-limited (cf. Norman & Bobrow, 1973, which is paradoxical because it suggests that the processing of category information may not vary with the difficulty of concept identification or other constraints on resources. Fifth, Ackerman et al. (1989) establish a relation only between reading difficulty and conceptual elaboration, and it is unclear if a more general relation exists between other sensory modes of concept identification (i.e, involving pictures) and elaborative processing. Finally, divided attention tasks may be inappropriate for examining constraints on elaborative processing in the respect that the tasks usually impose a concurrent demand on resources that does not diminish over time. But elaborative processing seems to require time, so it is unclear from previous studies if concept identification difficulty constrains children’s processing in some absolute sense or if the constraint is timelimited. Will children accomplish the processing given sufficient time? Similarly, studies using divided attention tasks have not provided direct evidence that concept identification processes limit elaborative processing in situations where attention is not divided. Such evidence is critical for a general claim about the constraints on elaborative processing in nonlaboratory situations. The four experiments in the present study address these issues. The general purpose was to determine if item identification processes limit elaborative conceptual processing at both acquisition and retrieval, and contribute to cued recall differences for third graders, sixth graders, and college students. The effects are interpreted as involving the discriminability and constructability of cue information. In Experiment 1, acquisition orienting questions were manipulated within-subject to vary the kind and extent of the elaborative processing of four-word stimuli (BusAirplane-Car-Train). The speed and accuracy of the orienting question answers were the measures of the extent of elaborative processing in acquisition. Recall effects were determined by cued recall for the targets (Train). Whether item identification processes limit elaborative process-

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ing was determined by varying the quality of the graphemic information in the acquisition stimuli or retrieval cues. In Experiments 2 and 3, acquisition processing time was varied to examine the time constraints on elaborative conceptual processing, and reading difficulty was varied in that the experimenter read the stimuli or only the subject read the stimuli. Experiment 4 assessed whether the results generalize to pictorial stimuli. EXPERIMENT 1 The specific goals of Experiment 1 were (a) to obtain a direct measure of the extent of elaborative conceptual processing at acquisition; (b) to show that recall varies with the extent of such processing; (c) to determine if the effects involve cue discriminability established in acquisition, or constructability in retrieval, or both; and (d) to determine if the effects vary with the difficulty of graphemic information processing at both acquisition and retrieval. Elaborative conceptual processing was defined in this study as involving a consideration of nonobvious aspects of stimulus information. The extent of elaborative processing at acquisition was varied by asking an analytic (“How many usually carry freight?), related (“How many are related?“) or category (“How many are vehicles?“) orienting question prior to presentation of each four-word stimulus. The category question was hypothesized to require the least elaborative processing because it addressed core attributes of the stimulus items (i.e., prototypical members of categories) that may be activated during concept identification, and it addressed obvious interitem relations in the stimuli that are represented pre-experimentally in semantic memory (Chi & Ceci, 1987). Thus, the answer to the question seemed obvious. Answering the analytic and related questions in contrast seemed to require a more careful and extensive analysis of stimulus information because they addressed attributes that are more ambiguously associated with the stimulus items or required the generation of item relations, or both. The analytic and related questions differed in that the former concerned information that distinguished among the stimulus items and the latter concerned relational information common to the items (Hunt & Einstein, 1981; Hunt & Seta, 1984). These questions were compared because recall may vary with the focus of elaborative processing (Ackerman, 1985; Hunt & Einstein, 198 1; Hunt & Seta, 1984). The measures of the extent of elaborative processing were the accuracy and latency of the orienting question responses in the no degraded control condition. It was assumed that the time required to complete a processing operation varies with the extent of elaboration. If the analytic and related questions tap nonobvious information, the responses should take longer and be less accurate than the responses to the category question. If

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category questions tap obvious attributes, the level of correct responses should approach unity, even for third graders. Finally, if the extent and focus of elaborative processing matters, the recall patterns should differ for the orienting questions, depending on the retrieval cues. The retrieval cues were composed of one (Bus) or two (Bus-Airplane) words that preceded the target in each stimulus. Recall advantages for the two-word cue over the one-word cue were the measure of constructability problems. The advantage shows that subjects have more difficulty reinstating the acquisition encoding context for the one-word cue. As established in other studies (Ackerman, 1988; Ackerman & Freedman, 1988a), one reason is that the association between the cue words in the two-word cue constrains cue interpretation by providing a hint about the classification of the stimulus in acquisition. To the extent that the association was not generated spontaneously, problems in using one-word cues are attributable to a lack of elaborative processing of cue information during retrieval. However, this may only matter in the present study for acquisition operations that focus on the relational information linking the stimulus words, like the category and related orienting questions (i.e., but not the analytic question). Similarly, advantages for the two-word cue should decrease with grade because constructability usually is more of a problem for children than for adults (cf. Ackerman, 1987). Given that constructability problems are minimized for two-word cues, recall differences for these cues can be used to measure the effects of elaborative processing on cue discriminability. Discriminability may be greater for the analytic and related questions than for the category question because the elaborative processing for the former has the effect of further defining the cue-target link. To determine if item identification processes limit elaborative processing, graphemic information in the words was degraded in the acquisition stimuli or retrieval cues, or the words were intact (no degradation control). If item degradation limits elaborative processing in acquisition, the speed and accuracy of the answers to the analytic and related orienting questions should be affected by acquisition degradation. Similarly, recall should be worse for the orienting questions (analytic and related) and cues (one-word) that require elaborative processing. These manipulations require some interpretive assumptions that should be made explicit. One is that the primary evidence for developmental conclusions concerns differences in the within-grade patterns of responses. The reason is that the difficulty of graphemic processing cannot be equated across grade. Thus, absolute differences in the size of the decrements for the degraded conditions for the children and college students are uninterpretable. Experiments 2 and 3 were designed to compensate for this difficulty in part.

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A second is that the degradation effects must be selective, and speci$c to elaborative processing. General effects on recall are uninteresting because a finding that children cannot perform a task when stimuli cannot be identified is trivial. The deficit cannot be linked to specific processes, and so cannot be interpreted unambiguously, as discussed by Brainerd and Reyna (1989) and others. Method Subjects. The subjects were 54 third graders (mean age = 8.5; range = 7.11 to 9.2) 54 sixth graders (mean age = 11.7; range = 10.10 to 13.2) and 54 college students (mean age = 18.6; range = 16.11 to 22.1). The children in all the experiments in this study came from schools serving middle income communities in and around Newark, DE. The college students attended the University of Delaware. For each grade, 50% of the subjects were female, and at least 82% were white. The subjects were assigned randomly to experimental cells without regard to sex or race. No subject participated in more than one experiment, or in any other recall experiment in the research programs of the senior author. The experiments were conducted over a 3-year period. Design. The experiment featured a cued recall procedure with intentional instructions. The design was a 3 (Grade) x 3 (Orienting Question: Category, Related, or Analytic) x 3 (Degradation: No Degradation, Acquisition Degradation, or Retrieval Degradation) x 2 (Retrieval Cue: One-Word or Two-Word) mixed factorial, with orienting question as the only within-subject factor. Materials. The acquisition materials included sets of 36 experimental and six buffer stimuli, each consisting of three noun context words and a final noun target word. The stimuli were taken from sets of 54 stimuli used in previous studies (cf. Ackerman & Freedman, 1988a; Ackerman & Bailey, 1989). The buffers were used to control for primacy and recency effects. The relation of the context words and the target varied. In 24 of the experimental stimuli the context words were categorically related to the target and to each other: in 6 of the stimuli the words were all unrelated; in 3 of the stimuli only the first context word was related to the target; in the remaining 3 stimuli only the second and third context words were related to the target. The latter 12 stimuli were controls used to vary the correct answers to the orienting questions, and to ensure that the subjects would not employ a scanning and answering strategy that minimized attention to the context words. Recall was not scored for the controls. Examples of the related stimuli are shown in Table 1. Among the six buffers were two stimuli in which all the words were related, two in which all were unrelated, and two in which only the second word was related to the target.

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TABLE 1 ORIENTING QUESTIONS, EXPERIMENT 1 Orienting

Stimulus

Category

AND RETRIEVAL

question Analytic

Related

Hammer-pliers-saw-wrench

How many tools?

are

How many related?

are

Rose-tulip-violet-lily

How many flowers?

are

How many related?

are

Retrieval Stimulus Hammer-pliers-saw-wrench Rose-tulip-violet-lily

CUES IN

How many are used to grip? How many are found near ponds‘? Cue

One-word

Two-word

Hammer Rose

-Pliers -Tulip

For all the stimuli, the target and context words referred to common objects and were in the reading vocabularies of second graders, as determined in previous studies in which second graders read the words. Each target word was from a unique category in the Battig and Montague (1969) adult category norms and was ranked between the fourth and tenth highest associates in the category. For the related stimuli, almost all the related context words ranked within five of the target ranking in the Battig and Montague norms, and most were among the top three or four highest ranking members of the category. The cues were composed of context words. The two-word cue contained the first two context words and the one-word cue contained the first context word. Multiple sets of the acquisition stimuli and retrieval cues were prepared that varied in item degradation. For the no degradation control, each stimulus was printed in black capital letters on a 5 x 7 in. index card in one horizontal row. The target words were underlined. The cue words were printed in black capital letters on 4 x 6 in. index cards. For acquisition degradation, the same retrieval cues were used as in the control condition. However, different acquisition stimuli were prepared featuring variations in the capitalization, color, size, and displacement of the letters in each word. Randomly intermixed in each word were capitals and small letters, letters that were too large or small, and letters of different colors. In addition, letters varied off both the horizontal and vertical axes of letter location and position in normal typography. Again the last word was underlined and the words were printed on 5 x 7 in.

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index cards. For retrieval degrudation, the acquisition stimuli were those used in the control condition. However, different 4 x 6 in. retrieval cues were prepared featuring similar variations of letter capitalization, color, size, and displacement. Three kinds of orienting questions were prepared that were the same for each degradation condition, and that were all in a “How many are . . . 7” . form. Examples are shown in Table 1. The category question concerned how many members of the target’s superordinate category were present in the stimulus. The related question simply asked how many were related. The analytic question concerned attribute information that was always true for the target, but only variably true for the related context words. For example, grapes grow on a vine, but apples do not, and trains often carry freight, but cars usually do not. Each kind of question was associated with eight of the related stimuli, four of the variably related control stimuli, and two buffers. Three lists of the questions were prepared to counterbalance for question and ensure that each stimulus was associated with each question. In Ackerman and Bailey (1989) groups of 10 college students were asked to answer the analytic questions to obtain an objective measure of the correct question answers. The subjects were given a sheet of paper containing each of the 24 related stimuli, the 12 control stimuli, and the associated orienting questions, and asked to answer the question by putting the number 1,2,3, or 4 on a space next to the question. Generally, there was little variability in answering, and the group means were close to the numbers predicted in formulating the questions. The same task with third and fifth graders, however, produced considerable idiosyncratic responding. For example, for the third graders only about 72% of the answers were the same as the predicted answers. Category questions were not used in the tasks because the answers of both children and college students have corresponded closely to predicted answers in previous experiments (cf. Ackerman, 1988; Ackerman & Bailey, 1989). Procedure. The subjects participated in groups of three. The subjects were told that they would see a series of cards each containing four words with the last word underlined, and that memory would be tested for the last word. Before each card was presented, the subjects would be asked a “How many?” question, concerning how many of the objects on each card were similar in some way. After the words were read to themselves by the subjects (not by the experimenter), the subjects should write 1, 2, 3, or 4 on the space provided on the answer sheet as quickly as possible and still be correct, and try to remember the last word. The procedure was illustrated with two pretraining stimuli. The buffer stimuli were the first and last three stimuli presented and the experimental stimuli were shuffled after each subject group. The stimuli were presented for 10 s each. The number of seconds it took for each subject to answer

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each orienting question was timed. The period began when a stimulus was held up by the experimenter, and ended when the experimenter visually detected movement by a subject’s pencil on the answer sheet. The interval duration was determined by a digital timer, and was recorded in whole seconds in a column specified by subject on a score sheet during the intertrial interval. Subjects that started writing at approximately the same time received the same score. The subjects were required to have a response before a trial ended. In practice, this meant that the subject sometimes wrote down an answer in response to the withdrawal of a stimulus card at the end of a trial, or soon after the withdrawal during the intertrial interval. These responses were recorded as “10.” The intertrial interval was 8 s, which gave the experimenter sufficient time to write down the speed of response and begin the next trial. It should be noted explicitly here that only approximate latencies to respond were recorded, and that the recording procedure was subject to experimenter error. This recording procedure was used in order to gain the full participation of third graders, who tend to drift off-task for mechanical recording procedures. However, response accuracy was determined objectively, and the similarity of response patterns for accuracy and latency described below attest to the reliability to the present procedure. Prior to retrieval, the subjects were told that they would be shown retrieval cues and asked to recall the last underlined words. The cues would consist of words (a word) that preceded the underlined word in the stimuli. All subjects were told to read the cue to themselves and to write the underlined target word in the space provided on the answer sheet. Subjects were told that spelling was not important and to guess if they did not know the answer. The retrieval procedure was illustrated with the appropriate cues for the pretraining stimuli. Then the six buffer cues were presented as an additional check on procedural understanding, and the subjects were instructed to answer out loud. Answers were corrected. Finally, the experimental cues were presented for 10 s each. After each group of subjects the cues were shuffled. Results The speed and accuracy of the orienting question answers for the related stimuli and target recall for these stimuli were analyzed independently. For these analyses, as well as those in the other experiments in this study, the significant interactions were analyzed further by analyses of simple effects and Newman-Keuls analyses were used to determine individual pair-wise differences. All the reported effects are significant at least at p < .Ol, unless indicated otherwise. Orienting questions. The latency (in seconds) and accuracy means are

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shown in Table 2. In the analyses, the data were collapsed across retrieval cue because the cue manipulation occurred subsequent to retrieval, and because a preliminary analysis showed no differences for cue. Latency was analyzed by a 2 (Grade) x 2 (Degradation) x 3 (Orienting Question) mixed analysis of variance. The third graders were excluded to avoid ceiling effects. As is obvious in the table, many of the third graders took the full 10 s to respond to the analytic question. The children often began to respond just as the trial ended, in response to the lowering of the stimulus card. These responses were scored as 10 s. All the effects were significant in the analysis. Sixth graders took longer to respond than the college students, F(1, 104) = 956.65, MSe = 16.03, and especially in the degraded condition as shown by the interaction, F(1, 104) = 33.47, MSe = 16.03. Similarly, responses took longer for the degraded than for the no degradation condition, F(1, 04) = 448.97, MSe = 16.03, and longer for the analytic question than for the related question and for the related question than for the category question, F(2, 208) = 2259.08, MSe = 10.76. Most importantly, the degradation x orienting question interaction. F(2, 208) = 15.01, MSe = 10.76. and the three-way interaction with grade, F(2, 208) = 32.84, MSe = 10.76, established that for the sixth graders the responses to the related and analytic questions were slowed by degradation more than the responses to the category questions. The college students showed a uniform slowing for degradation across orienting question. Number correct was analyzed by a 3 (Grade) x 2 (Degradation) x 3 (Orienting Question) mixed analysis of variance, again with the retrieval TABLE

2

THE MEAN PERCENTAGES OF CORRECT ANSWERS AND SPEED OF ANSWER IN s (IN PARENPHESES) FOR EACH ORIENTING QUESTION FOR EACH GRADE AND DEGRADATION CONDITION IN EXPERIMENT 1

Orienting Grade

question

Analytic

Related

Category

Third No degradation Acquisition degradation

59.0 (9.9) 27.8 (10.0)

76.4 (8.5) 48.6 (10.0)

97.2 (5.6) 87.5 (8.5)

Sixth No degradation Acquisition degradation

71.5 (8.3) 40.3 (9.8)

87.5 (7.1) 66.7 (9.4)

97.9 (5.0) 95.8 (5.8)

College No degradation Acquisition degradation

84.0 (6.6) 80.6 (7.5)

87.5 (6.5) 85.4 (7.1)

99.3 (3.2) 97.2 (3.8)

L?Question answers that did not occur within the 10-s time interval were scored as 10.

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manipulations excluded. “Correct” here is evaluated relative to the objective standard for college students established by the control task described in the procedure. It should be remembered that what was “correct” was more variable for third graders. Thus, absolute grade differences in levels of correct responding are uninformative. All the effects were significant. The critical effects for the present purposes are the degradation x orienting question interaction, F(2, 204) = 41.00 MSe = .34, and the three-way interaction with grade, F(2, 204) = 12.09, MSe = .34. The interactions occurred because correct answers generally were more frequent for the category question than for the related question and for the latter than for the analytic question, for both degradation conditions and each grade. However, for the children the effect of acquisition degradation was greater for the analytic question (mean reduction from the control for both groups = 31.2%) and for the related question (27.8% for the third graders and 20.8% for the sixth graders) than for the category question (9.7% and 2.1%, respectively). The college students showed no differences for acquisition degradation and the no degradation control. Recall. Independent 3 (Degradation) x 3 (Orienting Question) x 2 (Retrieval Cue) mixed analyses of variance were conducted for each grade to determine the effects of item degradation. Three effects were focal: (a) recall differences for the orienting questions for the two-word cue (the measure of discriminability); (b) advantages for the two-word cue over the one-word cue (constructability) that differ for orienting question; and (c) variations for the no degradation control and the other degradation conditions. The means are shown in Table 3. The significant effects of degradation (versus the control) are starred. For the third graders, orienting question interacted with degradation F(4, 96) = 8.90, MSe = .60. and with retrieval cue, F(2, 96) = 21.63, MSe = .60, and there was a three-way interaction, F(4, 96) = 3.87, MSe = .60. For no degradation, recall was greater for the analytic and related questions than for the category question for the two-word cue, and there were two-word cue advantages for the related and category questions but not for the analytic question. Acquisition degradation reduced recall for both cues for the analytic and related questions but not for the category question. Retrieval degradation reduced recall only for the one-word cue and only for the related and category questions. The sixth graders also showed an orienting question x degradation interaction, F(4, 96) = 10.68, MSe = .65, a degradation x retrieval cue interaction, F(2, 96) = 16.69, MSe = .65, and a three-way interaction, F(4, 96) = 3.23, MSe = .65. For no degradation, recall was greater for the analytic and related questions than for the category question for the two-word cue. There was a two-word cue advantage only for the related question. Acquisition degradation affected recall only for the related

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TABLE 3 THE MEAN PERCENTAGES OF RECALL FOR THE ANALYTIC EGORY (CAT) ORIENTING QUESTIONS CONDITION IN EXPERIMENT 1

FOR EACH

GRADE.

(ANA). RELATED (REL). AND CATRETRIEVAL CUE, AND DEGRADATION

One-word cue

Two-word cue

Grade

Ana

Rel

Cat

Ana

Rel

Cat

Third No degradation Acquisition degradation Retrieval degradation

59.7 36.1* 50.0

45.8 29.2* 23.6*

31.9 27.8 16.7*

68.1 37.5* 52.8

69.4 36.1* 56.9

47.2 50.0 47.2

Sixth No degradation Acquisition degradation Retrieval degradation

72.2 62.5 77.8

61.1 37.5* 34.7*

52.8 50.0 31.9*

80.6 68.1 79.2

80.6 55.6* 73.6

59.7 59.7 62.5

College No degradation Acquisition degradation Retrieval degradation

81.9 76.4 77.8

75.0 59.7* 50.0*

69.4 62.5 41.7*

80.6 81.9 83.3

81.9 59.7* 87.5

69.4 56.9 68.1

* Denotes significant differences from the no degradation

control.

question, and for both cues. Retrieval degradation affected recall only for the one-word cue and only for the related and category questions. As a result, there were large two-word cue advantages for these questions. The college students showed an orienting question x retrieval cue interaction, F(2, 96) = 13.92, MSe = .82, and a three-way interaction with degradation, F(94, 96) = 4.39, MSe = .82. For the no degradation control, recall was greater for the analytic and related questions than for the category question for the two-word cue. In addition, there were no two-word cue advantages. Like the sixth graders, acquisition degradation impaired recall only for the related question, and for both cues. Like both groups of children, retrieval degradation impaired recall only for the one-word cue and only for the retrieval and category questions. In each case, degradation resulted in two-word cue advantages. To determine the relation between recall development and elaborative processing, a 3 (Grade) x 3 (Orienting Question) x 2 (Retrieval Cue) mixed analysis of variance was conducted of recall for the no degradation control. The grade x orienting question x cue interaction was significant, F(4, 96) = 2.94, MSe = .70. The important novel finding was that developmental recall differences were smaller for the two-word cue for the analytic and related questions than for the category question.

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Discussion

The patterns for the no degradation control replicate the cued recall patterns reported in Ackerman and Bailey (1989). Four results are of interest. First, the question answers to the analytic and related questions generally took longer to answer and were correct less often than the answers to the category question. Although the measures were crude, taken together they indicate that the question answers were less obvious for the analytic and related questions than for the category question, and hence required more elaborative conceptual processing. More elaborative processing requires more time. The obviousness of the category information is especially apparent in that there was a total of only 8 incorrect responses to the 432 questions. The analytic and related questions were more ambiguous and clearly associated with more idiosyncratic interpretation. Second, recall for the two-word cue was greater for the analytic and related questions than for the category question for each grade. This finding establishes that elaborative processing facilitates recall, and in addition suggests that the effect concerns cue discriminability, or the creation of a unique cue-target link in acquisition. Third, developmental differences for the two-word cue were smallest in the situations of the most elaborative conceptual processing (i.e., the analytic and related questions). Consistent with the results of many other studies (cf. Ackerman, 1987), this finding suggests that increases in elaborative processing contribute to recall development. Fourth, both groups of children showed recall advantages for the twoword cue over the one-word cue for the related question. In addition, the third graders showed such an advantage for the category question. There were no advantages for the college students or for the analytic question. This finding suggests that children have cue interpretation problems for one-word cues, and that the problems concern reinstating or reconstructing the relational information linking the stimulus items (i.e., specifically targeted by the related and category questions). Thus, children have constructability problems in that they do not elaborate the information in one-word cues. In addition, this result is evidence that the analytic and related questions induce elaborative processes that are differentially useful in cued recall. The analytic question focused on item differences; the related question focused on interitem relations. According to Hunt and Einstein (1981) and McDaniel et al. (1986) the most efficient processing focuses on either the item differences or relational information that is not otherwise emphasized in a stimulus. Emphasized or obvious information gets encoded regardless. How did degradation in acquisition or retrieval affect these patterns? The results show clearly, first, that item degradation has an adverse effect. Second, the results suggest that the effects can be attributed to

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limitations on the elaborative processing of stimulus information. One piece of evidence is the general increases in latency and decreases in accuracy of the responses to the analytic and related orienting questions associated with acquisition degradation (i.e., relative to the no degradation control). Another is that there was no effect of acquisition degradation on the accuracy of the answers to the category question, that the latency increases associated with acquisition degradation for the sixth graders were smaller for the category question than for the other questions, and also that recall was affected adversely for the category question in only 3 of the 12 cells. This evidence shows that it was the conditions associated with elaborative processing that were primarily affected by the item degradation. Third, the effects differ for acquisition and retrieval processes. For retrieval, the effects concerned constructability. The evidence is that the effects were restricted to the one-word cue, and to the related and category orienting questions focusing on interitem relations. These were also the situations that seem to require the most elaboration of cue information, since some elaboration is provided in the cue per se for the two-word cue. These effects occurred for all grades, as evidenced most dramatically by the finding that even the college students showed advantages for the two-word cue over the one-word cue for the related and category questions. These effects indicate that the constraints on retrieval processing of one-word cue information are similar for children and adults. In no degradation conditions, college students seem able to meet these constraints, because there was no advantage for the twoword cues over the one-word cues; third graders clearly do not. Acquisition degradation, in contrast, primarily seemed to affect the elaborative processing of stimulus information in general (i.e., nonobvious relations), and hence the discriminability of the information linking a particular cue to a unique target in retrieval. The evidence is that all grades showed interference effects for the related question for the twoword cue, essentially reducing the related question pattern to the category question pattern. Thus, the subjects apparently were not able to construct a unique relation between the context and target words in each stimulus, and may have instead encoded only the general category relation. Acquisition degradation also affected recall for the one-word cue but did not introduce any novel two-word cue advantages, in contrast to those introduced by retrieval degradation for the college students. Thus, constructability was not affected by acquisition degradation. Finally, acquisition degradation only affected recall for the analytic question for the third graders. As will be established in Experiment 2, the reason probably is that the third graders were not able to accomplish the analytic processing within the time limitations. Some interpretive problems remain. One is that some third graders

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were not able to answer some analytic and related questions in the allotted time even for the no degradation control, limiting the interpretability of the results. Experiment 2 addresses this problem. A second is that there is no evidence in this experiment that graphemic processing interferes with elaborative conceptual processing in nondegraded situations, and more for children than for adults. This evidence is necessary for a general claim about the relations between item identification, elaborative conceptual processing, and recall development. The evidence is provided in Experiments 2, 3, and 4. Another problem concerns the possibility that the task was too hard in the degraded conditions. In this case, the results are uninteresting. However, the interference effects were selective, not general. In particular, the accuracy and latency of the responses to the category questions were affected minimally by the item degradation, the category questions were answered within the allotted time and with high accuracy rates (87.5%) even by the third graders for the acquisition degradation condition, and recall varied only in selected situations for the category question. These facts establish that even the third graders could read the degraded words and answer a question in the 10-s presentation interval, and thus accomplish the task. Only particular aspects of the performances were limited by the item degradation. Finally, one of the implicit claims of the experiment is that the recall performances were not mediated by acquisition or retrieval strategies. It probably can be assumed safely that strategic behavior in acquisition was minimal, because the orienting questions constrained encoding. In addition, the results of other studies (cf. Ackerman, 1987) establish that recall does not vary for the present kind of task whether the focus is on intentional or incidental memory. Since strategies are possible only in intentional tasks, the similar results for incidental tasks establish that the role of strategies in recall is minimal. It also is likely that strategic behavior was minimal in retrieval, because other research has shown that retrieval strategies contribute minimally to cued recall for the present kind of task (cf. Ackerman & Freedman, 1988b, 1988~). The results of Experiment 3 will provide converging support for this conclusion. EXPERIMENT

2

Experiment 2 remedies several problems in interpreting the patterns for the third graders in Experiment 1. One problem is that the degradation effects establish that graphemic processing can limit children’s elaborative processing, but do not establish that graphemic processing usually does limit such processing in nondegraded situations. Yet, the latter must be established for a general claim that limitations on elaborative processing contribute to developmental recall differences. A second problem is that the analytic and related orienting questions

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often were not answered by the third graders in the 10-s presentation interval in the acquisition degradation condition. As a consequence, there was no internal check that the children at least tried to answer the analytic and related questions. The fact that performance was good for the category questions is evidence that they did, of course. Nonetheless, the ambiguity concerning exactly what the children were doing for the analytic and related questions makes it desirable to determine recall performance in conditions where the children clearly do answer the orienting questions within the allotted time. These problems are addressed in Experiment 2 by manipulating four acquisition conditions. The subject read-IO condition is a replication of the no degradation control in Experiment 1 in which the time interval for answering the orienting question was 10 s. In the experimenter reud10 condition, the time interval was also 10 s, but the experimenter read the acquisition stimuli after the orienting question was asked. The subject read-l.5 condition was similar to the control except that the interval was lengthened to 1.5 s. If third graders usually have some trouble reading common words in conditions of no degradation and these graphemic processes limit conceptual elaboration, elaboration should be liberated in the experimenter read-10 condition and the subject read-15 condition with the reduced graphemic demands. The liberation should selectively enhance recall for the related and analytic questions requiring such elaborative processing. Since all three conditions involve nondegraded words. and reading of such common words usually is automatized and effortless for college students (cf. Hasher & Zacks, 1979), any effects of reducing graphemic difficulty can be assumed to occur uniquely for young children. Such effects then constitute evidence that a factor involving item identification may differentially limit the elaborative conceptual processing of children and adults. Finally, the degraded-15 condition is similar to the analogous acquisition condition in Experiment I, except that the time interval was extended to 15 s. The extension should permit the third graders to answer the orienting questions within the presentation interval. If so, any degradation effects vis a vis the subject read-15 condition can be attributed unambiguously to limitations on conceptual elaboration. Method Subjects. The subjects were 36 third graders (mean age = 8.8; range = 8.1 to 9.4). Design. The design was a 4 (Acquisition: Subject Read-lo; Experi-

menter Read-lo; Subject Read-15; Degraded-15) x 3 (Orienting Question) mixed factorial, with orienting question as the only within-subject factor. Only two-word cues were used. Materials andprocedure. The materials were from Experiment 1 (two-

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word cues only). The acquisition procedure varied. Again the subjects participated in groups of three. The subject read-10 condition replicated the no degradation control of Experiment 1. The subjects read the acquisition stimuli to themselves, and the presentation interval was 10 s. The presentation interval also was 10 s in the experimenter read-10 condition, but the experimenter read the stimuli out loud. The presentation interval was 15 s in the subject read-15 condition and degraded15 condition, and only the subjects read the stimuli (to themselves). In all conditions, the two-word retrieval cues were read only by the subject and the presentation interval was 10 s. Results Orienting question. The speed and accuracy of the orienting question responses are shown in the top of Table 4. As is apparent in the table, easing word identification difficulty in the experimenter read-10 condition and subject read-15 condition allowed the third graders to respond in the allotted times (10 and 15 s, respectivey). Similarly, the third graders were able to answer the questions in 15 s even in the degraded-15 condition. Accuracy and latency were analyzed by 2 (Acquisition) x 3 (Orienting Question) mixed analyses of variance, with presentation time controlled. Thus, the subject read-10 condition was compared against the experimenter read-10 condition, and the subject read-15 condition was compared against the degraded-15 condition. Overall, the results showed consistently that responses to the analytic question were significantly slower and less accurate than responses to the related question, which TABLE

4

THE MEAN PERCENTAGES OF CORRECT RESPONSES, SPEED OF RESPONSE (IN PARENTHESES) AND RECALL FOR EACH ACQUISITION CONDITION AND THE ANALYTIC. RELATED, AND CATEGORY ORIENTING QUESTIONS IN EXPERIMENT 2

Orienting Acquisition Subject read-10 Experimenter read-10 Subject read-15 Degraded-15

Analytic 61.1 62.5 65.3 44.4

(10.0) (8.7) (12.2) (13.5)

question responses Related 80.6 80.6 87.5 62.5

(8.6) (7.7) (8.9) (12.5)

Category 98.6 98.6 97.2 97.2

(5.4) (5.0) (5.6) (8.9)

Recall ‘Subject read-10 Experimenter read-10 Su!Tject read-15 Degraded- 15

62.5 73.6 81.9 47.2

65.3 80.6 86.1 47.2

51.4 55.6 54.2 54.2

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were significantly slower and less accurate than responses to the category question. In addition, for the IO-s analysis whether the subject or experimenter read the stimuli made no difference for accuracy. For latency, responses were slower in the subject read condition than in the experimenter read condition for the analytic and related questions but not for the category question, as shown by the acquisition x orienting question interaction, F(2, 32) = 29.41, MSe = 8.42. For the 15-s analysis, accuracy was worse for the degraded condition than for the subject read condition for the analytic and related questions but not for the category question, as shown by the interaction, F(2, 32) = 11.07. MSe = .31. However, the differences in response latency for the degraded and subject read conditions were larger for the related and category questions than for the analytic question, F(2, 32) = 38.68, MSe = 11.41, probably due to ceiling effects on the latter. Recall. Recall was analyzed by a 4 x 3 mixed analysis of variance. The means are shown in Table 4. The significant effects were the main effect for acquisition, F(3, 32) = 21.80, MSe = 2.08, and the interaction with orienting question, F(6, 64) = 8.59, MSe = .75. In every acquisition condition except the degraded-15 condition, recall was greater for the analytic and related questions than for the category question. In addition, only recall for the analytic and related questions varied with acquisition condition. For both, recall was greater in the subject read-15 condition and experimenter read-10 condition than in the subject read-10 condition, and greater in the subject read-10 condition than in the degraded-15 condition, Discussion One purpose of this experiment was to determine if the recall patterns of the nondegraded control of Experiment 1 would replicate. They did. In the subject read-10 condition, recall generally was better for the analytic and related questions than for the category question. In addition, the accuracy and latency data in all the conditions indicate that the category question was the easiest to answer. A second purpose was to determine if reading difficulty contributed to the recall levels, perhaps by limiting elaborative conceptual processing. If so, the children should be able to answer the orienting questions more quickly when the experimenter read the words, and especially for the related and analytic questions, as happened. For instance, the third graders often did not answer the analytic question in the allotted 10 s in the subject read-10 condition, but the mean response latency was 8.7 in the experimenter read-10 condition. Response latency did not differ for the category question. Most important, if easing reading difficulty liberates elaborative processing, and elaborative processing facilitates recall, recall for the analytic and related questions should be greater for

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417

the experimenter read-10 condition than for the subject read-10 condition, as it was. The same also should be true for the subject read-15 condition versus the subject read-10 condition, because the 5-s extension permitted the children to accomplish both graphemic processing and conceptual elaboration, as it was. Two other interesting points also emerge from the above patterns. One is that easing reading difficulty did nor affect category question recall. The primary constraint on recall for this question apparently is not the difficulty of item identification. Instead, the constraint may be that category processing does not result in a unique cue-target link. That is, category processing may lack discriminability. The other point is that the constraint on elaborative processing provided by reading difficulty should be considered time-limited to some extent. The problem for children is accomplishing both graphemic processing and elaborative conceptual processing within a given time span. The third purpose was to establish an unambiguous relation between item degradation and conceptual elaboration. As in Experiment 1, the excellent accuracy (mean = 97.2% correct) and latency (mean = 8.9 s) for the category questions in the degraded-15 condition indicate that the third graders could easily read the degraded word within the 15-s presentation interval. Clearly they could accomplish the task. More critical for the present purposes, the third graders also responded to the analytic (mean = 13.5 s) and related (12.5 s) questions within the 15-s interval. These results establish that the subjects were “on-task” and trying to answer these questions. Thus, the recall disadvantages associated with these questions for the degraded-15 condition versus the subject read15 condition can be attributed unambiguously to the effects of item degradation on the conceptual elaboration of stimulus information, and not to some nuisance variable. Concerning this conclusion, a reviewer suggested that the relatively low levels of accuracy in the degraded-15 condition (44.4% for the analytic question and 62.5% for the related question) are a threat to the conclusion that the subjects accomplished the task in this condition. However, “accomplishing the task” in the degraded condition means reading the words and answering a question. Clearly the third graders were able to accomplish these operations, as established by performance for the category questions. Any other problem must be attributed to difficulties in processing the conceptual relations among the words vis a vis the orienting questions, which is exactly what the degradation manipulation was designed to affect. EXPERIMENT

3

In Experiment 3, presentation time at acquisition or retrieval was limited to 3 s for sixth graders and college students. The acquisition

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manipulation in this experiment complements the manipulations in Experiment 2. The latter showed that reading difficulty limits elaborative processing for young children. However, the claim that these limitations contribute to developmental recall differences requires a parallel demonstration that reading common words is not a problem for older children and college students and does not limit elaborative processing in nondegraded conditions. If so, there should be no differences for the present subject read and experimenter read conditions even under extreme time pressure to process the stimulus information. However, because the elaborative processing per se requires time, as established in Experiment 1, recall for the analytic and related questions for both conditions should be reduced relative to Experiment 1. The processing for the “obvious” category question should be affected minimally. The purpose of the retrieval manipulation of cue presentation time was to determine if retrieval strategies contribute to recall for the present cued task. Limiting retrieval to a 3-s interval obviates the use of most known strategies. Thus, if the results are similar to those in Experiment 1 for the no degradation control, it can be inferred that retrieval strategies played a small role at best. The present experiment featured only the one-word cue because this cue is most in need of retrieval strategies, as suggested by the recall results of Experiment 1. Method Subjects. The subjects were 36 sixth graders (mean age = 1 I .8; range = 11.2 to 13.0) and 36 college students (mean age = 18.6; range = 16.11 to 19.9) Design. The design was a 2 (Grade) x 2 (Procedure: Experimenter Read or Subject Read) x 3 (Orienting Question) x 2 (Time Limitation: Acquisition or Retrieval) mixed factorial with orienting question as the only within-subject factor. Only the one-word cue was used. Materials and procedure. The acquisition materials and retrieval cues were from Experiment 1. The procedure was the same as in Experiment 1 except that the acquisition stimuli were presented for only 3 s in the acquisition condition, while the retrieval cues were presented for the same interval as in Experiment 1 (10 s). In addition, the acquisition stimuli were read by the experimenter or only by the subject. In the retrieval condition, the acquisition stimuli were presented for the same interval as in Experiment 1 (10 s), but the presentation duration of each retrieval cue was restricted to 3 s. Results Orienting question. In the time-limited acquisition condition, answers were begun to all three questions by most subjects just as the time expired, so latency is not a meaningful measure. The subjects clearly

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took as much time as they possibly could take. In the retrieval condition, the means were similar to those shown in the no degradation condition in Table 1. A 2 (Grade) x 2 (Procedure) x 3 (Orienting Question) x 2 (Time Limitation) mixed analysis of variance established that response accuracy did not differ for the sixth graders and college students for the acquisition condition. The means for the category question, related question, and analytic question respectively were 92.1, 60.2, and 44.4% for the college students, and 86.1, 63.9, and 50.0% for the sixth graders. For the retrieval condition, the means were 96.3, 89.8, ad 81.9%, respectively, for the college students, and 96.3, 87.5, and 74.1%, respectively, for the sixth graders. The only effects in the analysis were the main effects for time limitation, F(1, 64) = 21.47, MSe = 1.01, and orienting question, F(2, 128) = 37.43, MSe = .30, and the time limitation x orienting question interaction, F(2, 128) = 11.44, MSe = .30. Simple effects analysis established that the responses to the related and analytic questions were more affected by the time limits in the acquisition condition than the responses to the category questions. Recall. Recall was analyzed by a 2 (Grade) x 2 (Procedure) x 3 (Orienting Question) x 2 (Time Limitation) mixed analysis of variance. There were no effects for the procedure variable. The effects involving orienting question were the main effect, F(2, 128) = 14.12, MSe = .69, the interactions with grade, F(2, 128) = 4.59, MSe = .69, and with time limitation, F(2, 128) = 46.77, MSe = .69, and the interaction of all three factors F(2, 128) = 7.75, MSe = .69. The means of the latter are shown in Table 5. As shown by analysis of simple effects, the three-way interaction occurred because both grades showed greater recall for the category question than for the other questions for the acquisition condition. However, for the retrieval condition, the sixth graders showed greater recall for the analytic question than for the other questions. The college students showed greater recall for the analytic and related quesTABLE THE MEAN PERCENTAGESRECALL FOR LIMITED ACQUISITION AND

5

EACH GRADE, ORIENTING QUESTION, AND THE TIMERETRIEVAL CONDITIONS IN EXPERIMENT 3

Orienting question Grade

Analytic

Related

Category

Sixth Acquisition Retrieval

42.2 68.8

41.0 46.5

54.9 46.5

College Acquisition Retrieval

60.4 77.8

53.5 75.0

66.0 56.9

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tions than for the category question. There were no effects involving acquisition procedure. The overall effect of the time limitation was determined by f tests against recall for the one-word cue for the no degradation control (i.e., 10-s presentation) in Experiment 1 for the subject read procedure only. For the sixth graders in Experiment 1, the mean was 62.0%. The means in this experiment were 42.2% for acquisition and 53.9% for retrieval. Only the acquisition mean was significantly different from the Experiment 1 mean. For the college students in Experiment 1, the mean was 75.4%. The mean in this experiment was 60.0% for acquisition and 69.9% for retrieval. Again, only acquisition differed. Discussion

In contrast to the results for the third graders in Experiment 2, recall did not differ for the sixth graders and college students whether the subjects read the stimuli or the experimenter read the stimuli, even with a short presentation time. Reading the stimulus words in the no degradation control apparently was not a problem for older subjects, and does not constrain elaborative processing. Time does constrain elaborative processing in acquisition however. As shown in the acquisition condition, recall was equal to or worse for the analytic and related questions than for the category question. Given that the analytic and related questions induce elaborative processing, this result indicates that the 3-s presentation limited the processing. Converging evidence is that the orienting question responses for the analytic and related questions were more affected by the 3-s presentation than the responses for the category questions. In contrast, recall for the analytic and related questions exceeded category question recall in the IOs situation in Experiment 1. Given adequate time and elaborative processing in acquisition, does a 3-s limit affect retrieval? It probably should if active retrieval strategies mediate recall. A strategy scenario, for instance, could involve reading the cue word, deliberately thinking of the cue’s category, and then searching the category for the target and writing down the target. All this seems possible in 10 s (i.e., in Experiment I), but not in 3 s. Since recall was similar in this experiment and Experiment 1, it does not seem likely that retrieval strategies contributed much to recall in either experiment. EXPERIMENT

4

Are the limitations on conceptual elaboration associated with item identification restricted to graphemic processing and reading, or do they extend to concept activation and identification in general? This question was addressed in Experiment 4 for third graders by substituting pictures for the words in the stimuli and cues. Identification difficulty at acqui-

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sition was manipulated by having the experimenter no name was provided. Cue identification difficulty examined.

421 name the stimuli or at retrieval was not

Method

Subjecfs. The subjects were 36 third graders (mean age = 8.6; range = 8.0 to 8.11). Design. The design was a 2 (Identification Difficulty: Name or No Name) x 3 (Orienting Question) x 2 (Retrieval Cue) mixed factorial, with orienting question as the only within-subject factor. Materials and procedure. Pictures of the referents for the stimulus and cue words were obtained from the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test and other commercial sources, and reduced to a uniform size by a copying machine so that four were small enough to fit on a 5 x 7 in. index card. All the pictures were given to second graders to name to ensure referent familiarity. As a result of this procedure, four of the related stimuli were changed completely by substituting different and more visually familiar categories from the Battig and Montague (1969) norms. For example, the children could not name the flowers consistently. New orienting questions were prepared for these stimuli. For six other related and five of the control stimuli, one or two items were changed. The procedure was the same as in Experiment 1 except that the items were named by the experimenter in the name condition after the orienting question was asked. The items were not identified in any way in the no name condition. The naming was included in the fixed 10-s time interval, so the subjects in the name and no name conditions were exposed to the stimuli for exactly the same time. Results and Discussion Orienting question. Response latency and accuracy were analyzed by 2 x 3 mixed analyses of variance with the data collapsed across retrieval cue. The interactions were significant for both latency, F(2,68) = 559.46, MSe = 8.45, and accuracy, F(2, 68) = 14.41, MSe = .39. For the former, the responses to the category question took the least time for both the name and no name conditions, and naming speeded the responses only for the analytic and related questions. The means for the analytic, related, and category questions respectively were 10.0, 8.6, and 4.6 s for no name, and 8.7, 7.0, and 5.0 s for name. The same patterns occurred for accuracy, with the responses to the analytic and related questions correct less often than responses to the category questions, and naming mattered only for the analytic and related questions. The mean percentages of correct responses for the analytic, related, and category questions, respectively, were 52.8, 68.1, and 93.1 for no name, and 70.8, 82.6, and 99.3 for name.

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These results are evidence that answering the analytic and related questions required more elaborative processing of the picture information than answering the category questions. Recall. Recall was analyzed by a 2 (Identification Difficulty) x 3 (Orienting Question) x 2 (Retrieval Cue) mixed analytic of variance. The means are shown in Table 6. Overall, recall was greater for the analytic and related questions than for the category question, F(2. 64) = 41.41, A4Se = .89. Identification difficulty interacted with orienting question, F(2, 64) = 4.49, MSe = .89, because naming only enhanced recall for the analytic and related questions. Although the effects were small, they establish that elaborative conceptual processing varied with item identification difficulty even for pictures. In addition, orienting question interacted with retrieval cue, F(2, 64) = 4.39, MSe = .89, because the children showed a two-word cue advantage only for the related and category question. This result suggests that third graders encounter cue interpretation problems even for picture cues, indicating a deficiency in cue elaboration. GENERAL DISCUSSION

The results of all the experiments support the conclusion that elaborative conceptual processing facilitates cued recall in situations where item identification is of modest difficulty. The primary evidence is that recall was greater for the analytic and related questions than for the category question for the no degradation control. The results also are informative about how elaborative conceptual processing affects recall. Specifically, the effects differ for acquisition and retrieval processes. In acquisition, elaborative processing aids the discriminability of cue information, presumably by increasing the distinctiveness (Jacoby & Craik, 1979) or uniqueness of the cue-target link. The evidence was the recall advantages for the two-word cues for the analytic and related questions over the category question for the no degradation control, and of course the reduced recall for the twoword cues when elaborative processing was restricted by acquisition degradation. TABLE THE

MEAN

PERCENTAGES

OF RECALL

EGORY (CAT) ORIENTING QUESTIONS CATION CONDITIONS IN EXPERIMENT

6

FOR THE ANALYTIC

FOR EACH 4

(ANA),

CUE FOR THE NAME

One-word cue

RELATED AND No

(REL),

AND CAT-

NAME

Two-word

IDENTIFI-

cue

Identification

Ana

Rel

Cat

Ana

Rel

Cat

Name No name

76.4 63.9

58.3 50.0

43.1 38.9

81.9 68.1

80.6 69.4

55.6 54.2

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In retrieval, such processing aids constructability, or reinstatement of the acquisition encoding context. In this study, constructability problems concerned the elaborative processing of one-word cue information in order to reinstate the inter-item relational information. A deficiency in such processing caused by retrieval degradation then should have resulted in decreased recall for the one-word cue for the related and category questions, as occurred in Experiment 1. Finally, the results support the important developmental claim that elaborative conceptual processing increases developmentally both at acquisition and in using retrieval cues, and the increases contribute to recall increases. The evidence for this conclusion for acquisition is that the developmental recall differences for the no degradation control in Experiment 1 were smallest when elaborative processing was constrained by the analytic and related orienting questions, the extent of the third graders’ processing was affected by factors (e.g., subject-reading) that do not appear to influence college students, and the time restrictions on the processing seemed narrower for the children. Other evidence for this conclusion is summarized by Ackerman (1987). The question then becomes what limits or interferes with children’s elaborative processing? The novel contributions of the present study concern this question. The results of the experiments show, first, that a major limitation involves item identification processes. In particular, the results of Experiments 1 and 2 show that graphemic degradation selectively interferes with elaborative conceptual processing for all grades. Thus, reading difficulty limits elaborative processing. Insofar so reading proficiency increases developmentally, the interference should decrease with age. Experiments 2 and 3 provide direct evidence for this conclusion in that children’s orienting question answers and recall varied with reading difficulty even in nondegraded conditions, but not the responses of the older subjects. These results are particularly impressive because they establish a direct and specific link between the difficulty of item identification processes, measures of elaborative processing, and recall. Item degradation specifically affected the accuracy and latency of the responses to the related and analytic questions (i.e., which were empirically related to elaborative processing in the no degradation condition), and the effects on these measures were associated differentially with recall decrements relative to no degradation. These associations did not occur for the category questions, which establishes a selective relation between item identification processes and elaborative processing. The results of previous studies (cf. Ackerman et al., 1989; Bjorklund & Harnishfeger, 1987) failed to link item identification directly, specifically, or selectively with elaborative conceptual processing. Without such evidence, the constraints

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on processing could involve a variety of processes and mechanisms (cf. Brainerd & Reyna, 1989). Second, the results show that item identification processes limit elaborative processing at retrieval as well as acquisition encoding. Previous studies have focused on acquisition processes. Similarly, third, elaborative processing in this study probably did not involve strategic processes. This conclusion is important because other researchers (cf. Bjorklund & Harnishfeger, 1987) uniformly have tried to establish a specific link between the difficulty of item identification processes and strategic processing, with the typical goal of trying to explain children’s production deficiency in using strategies. The present results suggest that fundamental nonstrategic processes may be limited for children that contribute strongly to developmental recall differences. Fourth, the results show that the access of superordinate category information is not generally constrained by item identification processes. Instead, the use of category information seems inherently limited by its lack of discriminability in establishing a unique cue-target link. In this sense, the use of category information is data-limited and not resourcelimited (cf. Norman & Bobrow, 1975). This idea is important because the theoretical (cf. Chi & Ceci, 1987) and empirical (cf. Bjorklund & Harnishfeger, 1987) thrust of most developmental studies has concerned the constraints on processing category information imposed by competing item identification processes. The present results suggest that access of category information is not so constrained. Fifth, Experiment 4 showed that problems in item identification generalize to pictures as well as words. Ackerman et al. (1989) showed that reading problems limit children’s effortful processing, which is hardly a startling revelation given the dramatic reading improvement over the elementary school years. Experiment 4, however, shows that the interference of item identification processes is not restricted to reading or graphemic information, and thus establishes a more general link between perceptual and conceptual processing. Sixth, the interference provided by graphemic processes is time-limited. Given sufficient time, children may accomplish both item identification and elaborative conceptual processing, as shown in Experiment 2, and given insufficient time the elaborative processing of college students may be limited by problems of item identification, as established in Experiment 3. This conclusion is important because the results of previous studies using divided attention tasks suggest that there are absolute limitations on children’s elaborative processing. Divided attention tasks are inappropriate for examining time-limited processes because the concurrent interference associated with the secondary task usually does not diminish over time. Seventh, the results of Experiment 2 and 4 show that item identification

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difficulty may constrain elaborative processing by children even in situations where the stimuli are not degraded, and there is no external strain on processing resources, like the demands associated with divided attention tasks. The unusual experimental circumstances of previous studies have prohibited generalization to constraints on children’s processing in more normal circumstances where stimuli are not degraded and attention is not divided artificially. Finally, some important theoretical questions remain. One concerns what is included in “item identification,” and can a principled distinction be drawn between identification processes and more elaborative processing? The distinction drawn in the present study is that the latter is inherently relational, focusing either on information that differs (analytic) between or is common (related question) among stimulus items. Both serve to activate or focus attention on attribute information in an item that might not be activated when an item stands alone. The item information in contrast clearly involves information used in perceptual recognition, but also may include core conceptual attributes of information that constitute item significance even when standing alone. Work by Chi (cf. Chi & Ceci, 1987) in particular supports the latter claim. Both aspects of item information may develop in the sense that the item information is more accessible or easily activated for college students than for young children. However, it is clear that other distinctions are possible, or it may be more powerful in the end to conceptualize item identification and elaborative processing as reflecting continuums either of information, or effortful processing. Another question concerns the mechanism of the limitation. Other kinds of limitations reported by developmental researchers usually have concerned strategic processes (cf. Bjorklund & Harnishfeger, 1987, 1989; Guttentag, 1984, 1989), which probably did not contribute to the results in the present experiments. However, the kind of processing limited in the present experiments may be similar to that involved in many encoding strategies (i.e., the focus on relating stimulus items), which suggests that the mechanisms may be similar. Bjorklund argues in particular that the limiting factor on children’s use of encoding strategies concerns the availability of processing resources. Assuming that processing capacity is limited and fixed developmentally, resources devoted to one aspect of an encoding process will necessarily limit other aspects. Thus, if the ease of item identification processes increase with age, the resources available for strategic processes, and also for elaborative conceptual processes perhaps, will increase accordingly. The present results clearly are consistent with this hypothesis in that item identification processes seem to limit elaborative conceptual processing, the efficiency of item identification processes increases with age, and hence these increases seem to contribute to increases in elaborative

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SILVER,

AND SCOBEY

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June

5,

1989;

REVISED

December 27, 1989.