THE EFFECT OF VERBALIZATION IN CHILDREN'S LEARNING AS A FUNCTION OF CHRONOLOGICAL AGE

Abstract

Several recent studies have been concerned with the role of verbalization in children's learning. Children, as do adults (2), learn to discriminate among stimuli more rapidly if they are given pretraining experience in naming the stimuli (3, 4, 6, 9), or if they attach a verbal response to the stimuli during training (Io, ii). Recall of stimuli has also been found to increase with prior naming of the stimuli (8). Significantly faster learning and a greater incidence of transposition have been found for verbal than for preverbal Ss (I, 7)Although age differences in the effects of verbalization on learning have been noted (6, 9), possible changes in the effects of verbalization on discrimination learning with increasing CA have not been studied systematically. The purpose of this study is to investigate such effects with children of CAs 3 through 9 years. One group of Ss at each age level is instructed to verbalize the name of the stimulus prior to each response, while another group is not instructed to verbalize in this manner. Several predictions about the performance of Ss are made. First, groups instructed to verbalize stimulus names should learn the discrimination more rapidly than Ss not given these instructions. This is in line with the assumption (12) that verbalization of stimulus names provides response-produced stimuli which increase the differences among the stimuli and aid learning by increasing the number of stimuli to which a discriminative response can become attached. Second, in both verbal and nonverbal conditions learning rate should increase with increasing CA. Such an increase would be in accord with the assumption that learning ability improves with increasing age.