Determinants of Verbal Learning

Verbal learning has been subjected to the most extensive experimental investigations of any form of learning, and these studies indicate that its course is influenced by a number of factors. The most important determinants are features of the verbal material itself: the length of the list to be learned, and the meaningfulness of the material. Meaningfulness is measured in several ways — the number of associations a word elicits in a fixed time, the familiarity of the material and its frequency of usage, the relations among the words in the list, and the sequential dependence of each word on the words that precede it. Lists of nonsense syllables are available at different levels of association value, and matched lists of the same association value can be selected for fair comparison.

On the basis of research findings, certain generalisations have been made. Learning time increases with an increase in the length of the list, and with the occurrence of words with low association values or a lack of relations among the items in the list. The more time it takes to learn the list, the stronger the learning tends to be. In this respect, the total time principle operates: it states that a fixed amount of time is necessary to learn a fixed amount of material, regardless of the number of trials into which that time is divided. …