Spontaneous and Induced Verbal Rehearsal in a Recall Task

A nonverbal serial recall task was administered to 89 6and 7-year-old children. Subgroups of rehearsers and were identified by means of direct observation of Ss' spontaneous semi-overt verbalizations during fifteen-second delays between presentation and recall. The serial recall of the nonrehearsers proved significantly poorer than that of the rehearsers. Brief training sufficed to induce the nonrehearsers to rehearse, and in consequence their recall scores became almost indistinguishable from those of the spontaneous rehearsers. When subsequently given the option of rehearsing or not, however, they tended to abandon the strategy. The results suggest that, at least for this age group and for this sort of task, the child's unmediated behavior is due to his failure to produce the appropriate mediator (i.e., a production deficiency) rather than to an inability, given its production, to utilize it effectively (i.e., a mediational deficiency).