Abstract
Children aged 3 and 4 were asked to name from memory items belonging in a house. Experimental groups completed the task twice, under two conditions. In the function-context condition, the experimenter provided a verbal description of use in response to each item named. In the objectcontext condition, the child was given a miniature replica of each item named. A control group at each age received only general encouragement for each response. Results indicated that the function context was more facilitative to retrieval than was the object context, which did not differ in effect from the control condition. Function context also had major effects on the types of items retrieved: More room items and fewer people and animals were produced in the functioncontext condition than in the other conditions. The representation of function and action in early conceptual schemes is discussed.
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This research was supported by NSF Grant No. 7822970. We thank Hilary Horn Ratner for significant contributions to early planning of this work, and Janice Harper and Charlotte Hebert for help in data collection.
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Myers, N.A., Thompson, J.G. Context effects on retrieval at ages 3 and 4. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 24, 35–38 (1986). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330496
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330496