Can recall differences among children be attributed to rehearsal effects?

Abstract

The interrelationship between children''s recall performance and the production deficiency hypothesis was investigated. Kindergarten through 4th grade children were classified as producers or non-poducers according to whether or not they engaged in spontaneous verbal rehearsal between stimulus presentation and recall. For both groups, either rehearsal was subsequently prevented by interpolating a verbal task prior to recall, or rehearsal was trained. Even when rehearsal was prevented, producers recalled significantly more items than non-producers. Instructions to rehearse did increase the non-producers'' performance. When the data were free to vary in both directions, the non-producers'' recall level was still significantly lower than the producers''. An approximate 1-item recall difference between the 2 groups persisted across the studies, indicating the insufficiency of the production deficiency hypothesis in accounting for the recall differences between the groups. The nature of the residual difference was explored in terms of a potential underlying memory span advantage or a general encoding advantage correlated with the producers'' group.