Effect of Intra-List Similarity and Impulsivity-Reflectivity on Kindergarten Children’s Word Recognition Performance

Forty impulsive and forty reflective kindergarten children learned two word lists which differed in degree of intra-list similarity, The intent of the investigation was to determine what effect the impulsive-reflective conceptual tempo and the high and low intra-list similarity variables would have on the word recognition accuracy of beginning readers. Analysis of variance indicated that while degree of intra-list similarity had little effect on the word recognition skill of impulsive children, the reflective children who learned the list of highly similar words tended to do better on the word recognition task (p < .10) than reflective children who learned the low similarity list.