Serial learning as a function of meaningfulness and mode of presentation with audio and visual stimuli of equivalent duration.

Abstract

To shed further light on the role of the "input modality" in the verbal-learning process, 126 Ss, 21 per condition, learned 12-item serial lists of disyllables which represented 3 levels of meaningfulness (m) and were presented to S either aurally or visually. An important difference between this study and previous ones is that the duration of stimulation under aural and visual conditions was equated with a high degree of precision. It was found that m and mode interacted reliably in that performance with low m material was better under visual than under aural conditions of presentation while this trend was observed to be reversed with high m material. Serial position and the sex of Ss did not interact with either m or mode of presentation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)