Organization Strategies and Developmental Recall

Summary

This experiment was conducted to determine whether the shift in children's organizing behavior from syntagmatic to paradigmatic is a result of changes in actual abilities. The results suggested that this shift occurs relatively independently of changes in ability. Elementary and junior high school pupils (N = 120) were stratified developmentally on the basis of their ability to conserve mass, weight, and volume, and the Ss at each conservation level studied a 16-item paired-associate list under either a category inclusive, a syntagmatic, a paradigmatic, or an unrelated organization condition. Main effects were observed for both the organization and conservation factors, but these factors failed to interact as a significant source of variance. Ss at each developmental level were able to use the syntagmatic and paradigmatic organization criteria with nearly equal success