Effects of Overlearning and Similarity on Transfer in Word Recognition

Abstract

Kindergarten children required more trials to learn a training list of similar than dissimilar words but made fewer errors on subsequent transfer tasks which tested their knowledge of all of the letters in the training words. This replication of previous work was extended by including a third group of children who were trained on the dissimilar list but who were given a few overlearning trials to make up for the additional training trials given the group who learned the similar list. In general, scores of the children in the overlearning group fell between scores of the children in the similar and dissimilar groups. Implications for reading instruction are discussed.