Abstract
Students in the second through the sixth grades were read a series of very short (one-sentence) “stories” by teachers in regular classroom settings. In each sentence, there was one clearly implied word. The students were then asked to write, cued by the title of each “story,” one word that they had heard and one word that they had not heard but had thought of (and presumably inferred). A reliable increment over grades occurred in the number of implied words that were reported as thought of, with a sharp increment from the second to the third grades; and there was also a more regular increment over grades in the number of implied words that were used as associates to cues in a subsequent test.
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I thank Rita Taubman, Director, and the participating teachers of St. Andrews Episcopal School, Ft. Pierce, FL, for their help in the collection of data and Arthur Gutman for the analyses of variance.
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Marx, M.H. Development of inferences over elementary-school grades: I. Recall and association of implicit words. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 29, 460–462 (1991). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333971
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03333971