Paired-Associate Learning and Free Recall of Nouns as a Function of Concreteness, Specificity, Imagery, and Meaningfulness

Abstract

Abstractness-concreteness and generality-specificity of words were simultaneously varied in a factorial design on the stimulus and response sides of paired-associate lists constructed from 96 nouns. The analysis of recall scores from the auditory presentation of 2 alternating study trials and recall trials revealed significant ( p < .001) effects of both variables on the stimulus side of pairs. A smaller effect on the response side was significant ( p < .05) only in the case of specificity. A second experiment showed positive effects ( p < .001) of both concreteness and specificity on free recall. Mean scores were also available for the nouns on their rated capacity to evoke sensory images ( I) and on their meaningfulness ( m). A correlational analysis indicated that, of the attributes involved, I correlated most highly with learning scores. Furthermore, consistent with the hypothesis that stimulus-evoked imagery can mediate response recall, the superiority of I was greatest when the items served as stimulus terms in PA learning.