Journal of

Experimental Psychology
VOL. 79, No. 1, PART 1 JANUARY 1969

INSTRUCTIONS TO USE VERBAL MEDIATORS IN

PAIRED-ASSOCIATE LEARNING 1
MARIAN SCHWARTZ
University of Wisconsin

An instructional set to use verbal mediators was compared with standard

instructions in its effect on the acquisition of a single paired-associate (PA)
list. Two experiments were run in which the study trial was paced at a
2-sec. rate. Recall was paced at 2 sec. in the first experiment and was
untuned in the second. Instructions to mediate greatly increased the number
of reported mediators in both experiments, but facilitated performance only in
the second. The results of Exp. II were interpreted as evidence that
natural language mediators can play a causal role in facilitating PA
learning by college level .S's. The lack of facilitation in Exp. I was tentatively
attributed to inability to utilize mediators effectively with 2-sec. recall
intervals. It was suggested that the materials and instructions employed may
allow greater experimental control than a transfer design typically affords
over the mediators which Ss actually use.

The use of what has variously been called
mnemonic devices, associative aids, natural
language mediators, or implicit mediators has
been found to be related to better perform-
ance in the acquisition and retention of paired
associates (e.g., Montague, Adams, & Kiess,
1966; Runquist & Farley, 1964). That is,
pairs which, according to S's report, were
learned with the aid of a mediator tend to
be learned faster and retained better than
pairs for which 5" reports no mediator. That
the use of mediators facilitates acquisition and
retention does not necessarily follow, how-
ever, from this observed relationship. The
reported mediator may be a correlate or a
consequence, rather than a determinant, of
high associative strength.
. , . Several recent experiments have compared
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Grant to the Graduate School of the University of
Wisconsin.
1
1969 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.
In order to impose some systematic control
on S's use of mediators in the acquisition of
a single paired-associate (PA) list, several
investigators have employed instructional
sets. Jensen and Rohwer (1963) instructed
adult retardates to make up a sentence or
phrase linking the two members of each pair,
and found that those instructed to mediate
in this way learned far faster than did un-
instructed controls. Retardates were used
by these investigators on the assumption that
such 5"s would be likely to form verbal
mediators in rote learning if, and only if,
instructed to do so by E; whereas normal
adults, particularly college students, would
be expected to mediate whether instructed
to do so or not.
the effects of instructions to mediate vs.
standard instructions, using Ss at the college
or high school level. With such .S's, clear
 MARIAN SCHWARTZ
evidence that mediation instructions facili-
tated learning was found only when SB were
told to use mediating images, not when they
were instructed to use verbal mediators or
when the nature of the mediator to be em-
ployed (imaginal or verbal) was left unspeci-
fied. In a study by Martin and Dean
(1966), instructions to "associate or link up
the nonsense syllable and the word in some
way" did not significantly affect PA learning.
In three experiments by McNulty (1966),
instructions to form ridiculous or bizarre
linkages between the stimulus and response
terms had no significant effect, although the
direction of the learning differences consist-
ently favored the mediation as opposed to
the standard condition. Bugelski, Kidd,
and Segmen (1968) facilitated recall of
object-name responses by teaching 5s to as-
sociate these responses with the Stimulus
Numerals 1-10, using the technique of "pic-
turing" the responses together with mediators
which rhymed with the numerals. Yarmey
and Thomas (1966) found that instructions
to mediate via mental images facilitated
learning of concrete nouns, but instructions to
use verbal mediators (to form "silent verbal
chains" connecting the members of each pair)
inhibited learning of abstract noun pairs. In
a study by Paivio and Yuille (1967), 5s
were instructed to use either verbal medi-
ators, mental images, or rote repetition in
learning a PA list. Recall was poorer for
the rote-repetition group than for either of
the two mediation groups, a result which
could have been due to facilitation in the
mediation conditions, inhibition produced
by the repetition instructions, or both.
The present study investigated the effect of
an instructional set to use verbal mediators
on the acquisition of a single PA list by col-
lege undergraduates. The main purpose was
to manipulate as an independent variable the
use of natural language verbal mediators in
order to determine whether such mediators
can play a causal role in facilitation of PA
learning by college level 5s. It was ex-
pected that substantial mediation would occur
even in the absence of an instructional set,
but that the number and type of mediators
employed by 5s could be partially controlled
through instructions (cf. Paivio & Yuille,
1967). It was also assumed that the phras-
ing of the instructions and the nature of the
materials used would be important factors in
determining whether learning would be facil-
itated as a result of mediation instructions;
accordingly, materials and instructions were
designed to maximize the possibility of facili-
tation.
EXPERIMENT I
Method
Materials.A list of pairs was constructed on
the assumption that instructions to use a verbal
mediator would be most effective, relative to a
control receiving standard instructions, where (a)
associations between stimulus and response terms
would be relatively hard to form directly, without
the use of mediators, (6) a potentially useful medi-
ator exists for each pair, but (c) the potential
mediators are not so obvious that they would be
as readily available to uninstructed as to instructed
,?s. The materials consisted of the following 10
pairs, in which the stimulus was a single letter and
the response was a word: A-pie, j>-ca/t, E-hard, o-
bad, K-murder, i*-hate, 'B.-jast, t-clock, v-win,
X-WMJIC. Each response term is a primary re-
sponse to a word which is itself a primary response
to the stimulus letter. According to the norms pub-
lished by Anderson (1965) for single associations
to uppercase letters, the primary responses to the
10 stimulus letters used are apple, dog, easy, good,
kill, love, run, time, victory, and xylophone, re-
spectively. To obtain the response terms for the
present study, the 10 words apple, dog, etc., were
included among the stimuli in a discrete word
association test administered to an undergraduate
psychology class; and the primary responses to
these 10 words, based on data from 38 undergradu-
ates, were used as the responses in the PA list
shown above.
Procedure.The pairs were presented on a
Lafayette memory drum for a single study trial in
which each pair was shown for 2 sec., followed by
a single recall trial in which each stimulus letter
was presented alone for 2 sec. The 6"s were run
individually. They were instructed to study the
pairs on the study trial, and to call out the response
words when the single letters appeared alone on
the recall trial. In addition, 5s in Group I (in-
structed), but not those in Group U (uninstructed),
were told that "some subjects find it easier to learn
a list of this type by mentally changing the left-
hand letter into a word that begins with that letter
and is also related to the right-hand word," and
were advised that they might find it easier to use
the same strategy. Between study trial and recall
trial there was an 8-sec. interval during which S
was reminded of the recall instructions. One
minute after the end of the recall trial, 5" was given
a sheet on which were the 10 stimuli along with his
 INSTRUCTIONS TO USE VERBAL MEDIATORS
own response, if any, to each. For all pairs, re-
gardless of whether a response had been given,
5 was asked to write whatever associations or aids
to memory he had used to help him remember, or
try to remember, the responses.
Serial positions and sequences of items were
changed between study trial and recall trial, and at
least four other items intervened between the study
trial and recall trial appearance of any given
item. For generality, two different sets of study
and recall orders were used.
Subjects.The SB were 52 undergraduates from
an elementary psychology course, none of whom
had taken the word association test described above.
The 5s were assigned to conditions in blocks of
2, with 1 instructed and 1 uninstructed S per block.
Running order within each block was random.
Results
A count was made of the number of pairs
on which 5 reported using, or tried to use, a
stimulus letter (SL) mediator; i.e., a medi-
ator which consisted of a word starting with
the stimulus letter for that pair. The cate-
gory of "SL mediator" corresponded to the
type of mediator which the Group I in-
structions encouraged 5"s to use; it included
but was not limited to the primary responses
to the stimulus letters as shown in the Ander-
son (1965) norms. These primary re-
sponses were found to constitute 85.8$;
of all SL mediators and were not separately
analyzed.
Stimulus letter mediators were reported
for a mean of 4.69 pairs in Group I and 2.35
pairs in Group U. The difference was sig-
nificant, * (50) = 3.16, p < .01. A relation-
ship between reported mediation and correct
recall is indicated by the finding that 74.3%
of all pairs with and 21.7% of all pairs with-
out SL mediators were correctly recalled. If
"mediator" is defined so as to include not
only SL mediators but any kind of associa-
tive aid reported by S, the mean number of
mediated pairs would be 5.31 in Group I
and 3.54 in Group U, * (50) = 2.59, p < .01;
and the percentage of pairs correctly recalled
would be 74.8% of all mediated and 12.8%
of all nonmediated pairs.
A comparison between Group I and Group
U in the number correct on the recall trial
showed no significant difference. The mean
number of responses correctly recalled was
4.31 in Group I and 3.73 in Group U, t
(50) = .86, p > .10. This combination of
resultsthat instructions to mediate increase
the number of pairs on which 5"s report using
mediators, that learning is superior for re-
portedly mediated pairs, but that instruc-
tions to mediate have no significant effect on
group differences in learningis completely
consistent with the findings of Martin and
Dean (1966).
EXPERIMENT II
Method
The failure of the instructional set to produce
a difference between groups in recall perform-
ance may have been due to the form or the rapid
pacing of the recall test, or to the wording of the
instructions. With the idea of maximizing the
chances of producing facilitation with mediation
instructions, the experiment was rerun with the
following changes; (a) The recall test was untimed.
Immediately after the study trial, S was given a
sheet on which were the 10 stimulus letters, and
told to write after each letter the word that had
been shown with it. (6) The recall test was
followed by a matching test, also untimed, in which
S was shown the 10 stimulus letters and an alpha-
betical list of the 10 response words, and required
to write each word after the appropriate stimulus.
Immediately after the matching test, S was
asked to report whatever mediators he had used in
learning, (c) Examples were added to the media-
tion instructions for Group I. Two sample pairs
(N-silent and o-salt) were shown, and Group I
5s were told that they might mentally change the N
to noisy, the o to ocean. These pairs were also
incorporated in the instructions for Group U as
examples of the type of pair 5s would be asked
to learn, but with no mention of possible mediators,
(rf) The instructions before the study trial in-
cluded the warning that each pair would be shown
for only a couple of seconds.
Subjects.The 5s were 32 undergraduates from
an elementary psychology course, none of whom
had served in Exp. I or in the word association
test. Assignment of 5s to groups was as in Exp. I
with the additional restriction that 5s with previous
experience in verbal learning experiments should
be equally represented in the two groups.
Results
The mean number of correct responses on
the recall test was 8.56 in Group I and 6.00 in
Group U; on the matching test, mean cor-
rect was 9.56 in Group I and 6.88 in Group
U. The number of -S"s out of 16 who gave
all 10 responses correctly was, on the recall
test, 6 in Group I and 1 in Group U; on the
 MARIAN SCHWARTZ
matching test, 13 in Group I and 5 in Group
U. Because of the apparent heterogeneity
of variance and skewness of the distributions,
the Mann-Whitney U test was used to evalu-
ate significance. Number correct was signifi-
cantly greater in Group I than in Group U on
both the recall test, U = 47.5, p < .001, and
matching test, U = 55.5, p < .01. In view
of the ceiling effect in Group I, particularly
on the matching test, these figures undoubt-
edly underestimate the difference between
the two groups.
The absolute number of mediators reported
was greater than in Exp. I, but the same
trends emerged in regard to differences in
reported mediation between Groups I and U.
The primary responses to the stimulus letters
accounted for 87.9% of all SL mediators,
and were not analyzed separately. Stimulus
letter mediators were reported for a mean of
8.75 pairs in Group I and 4.69 pairs in
Group U, a significant difference, t (30)
4.53, p < .001. It was found that 89.8% of
all pairs with and 38.1% of all pairs without
SL mediators were correctly recalled. If
"mediator" is defined so as to include any
kind of associative aid reported by S, the
mean number of mediated pairs would be 9.00
in Group I and 6.62 in Group U, t (30) =
3.14, p < .005, and the percentage of pairs
correctly recalled would be 85.2% of all
mediated and 28.6% of all nonmediated pairs.
DISCUSSION
The major finding of Exp. II is that over-
all learning was facilitated by an instructional
set to use verbal mediators. This, coupled
with the findings that instructions to mediate
increased the number of mediators reported and
that reportedly mediated pairs were more likely
to be learned, provides evidence that natural
language mediators can play a causal role in
facilitating PA learning by college level S"s,
and are not simply correlates or consequences
of high associative strength. An alternative,
although less parsimonious, interpretation
would be that the instructional set facilitated
performance through some nonmediational
mechanism (e.g., by increasing motivation),
and that the performance gain effected in this
way produced, in turn, an increase in the
number of mediators reported.
The failure of the instructional set to affect
recall in Exp. I and its success in Exp. II
could have stemmed from several procedural
differences between the two studies. The
most important of these differences, however,
is probably the time allowed for recall. On
the assumption that the increase in recall time
was the crucial procedural change between
Exp. I and II, the results are consistent with
those of Schulz and Lovelace (1964), and
may be interpreted in terms of their distinction
between discovery and utilization of mediating
associations. Schulz and Lovelace varied the
lengths of the anticipation and study intervals
in the test list of a three-stage mediation para-
digm. They failed to find mediation with a
2 : 2 rate or a 2:4 rate of presentation but
succeeded with a 4: 2 rate. Their conclusion
was that lengthening the anticipation interval
(i.e., the time allowed for response recall)
provided more opportunity for effective utili-
zation of already discovered mediators. In
the present study, instructed 5"s in both ex-
periments reported that they used, or tried to
use, many more mediators than did the unin-
structed 5s. A concomitant difference in
learning, however, occurred only in Exp. II,
where unlimited time was allowed for recall,
and not in Exp. I, where the recall test was
paced at a 2-sec. rate. An interpretation in
terms of the discovery-utilization distinction
would be that the instructional set facilitated
discovery of mediators during the study trial,
but that effective utilization of these mediators
was possible only when the time allowed for
response recall was longer than 2 sec.
Experiments on mediation in PA learning
have been of two kinds: (a) transfer studies,
in which one or more stages of the mediation
paradigm involve associations built in through
transfer from prior lists learned in the experi-
mental situation; and (&) single-list acquisi-
tion studies, in which the mediators under in-
vestigation consist of natural language verbal
associations or of images, with no experi-
mentally built-in components.
In regard to the transfer approach, several
investigators have recently suggested that hav-
ing 6"s learn a sequence of lists conforming
to an -defined mediation paradigm may afford
less experimental control than had previously
been supposed over the associations which 5s
actually use in learning the test-list pairs
(Adams, 1967; Martin & Dean, 1964; Richard-
son, 1968), or may not, in fact, produce media-
tion at all (Handler & Earhard, 1964). In
particular, it should be recognized that S1 is
 INSTRUCTIONS TO USE VERBAL MEDIATORS
likely to draw upon natural language habits in
forming his own mediators, which he inter-
poses between the stimulus and response terms
of the pairs he is required to learn, either in
place of or in addition to the -defined media-
tor (Montague & Kiess, cited in Adams, 1967,
p. 96). While this tendency to import natural
language mediators may not bias comparisons
in gross performance between the mediation
and control conditions, it may seriously confuse
any attempts at a fine-grained analysis of the
mediational processes involved in test-list per-
formance when the transfer approach is used.
Single-list acquisition studies have, as a
rule, afforded an opportunity for the use of
natural language or imaginal mediators in
learning, and for postexperimental mediation
reports, without experimental manipulation of
the specific mediators used.
The present study involves an attempt to
exercise experimental control over the use of
natural language mediators in a single-list ac-
quisition experiment. It is, in effect, an A-B,
B-C, A-C chaining paradigm in which the first
two stages are inferred from word association
norms and the third corresponds to the single
list presented. This list, particularly in con-
junction with the mediation instructions, ap-
pears to allow a reasonable degree of experi-
mental control over the class of mediators used
by 5s, and over the specific verbal mediators
within that class, assuming that the postexperi-
mental reports reflect the associations actually
used during learning. In Group I of Exp. II,
e.g., 97% of all associative aids reported were
SL mediators, and 89% of these SL mediators
were the primary responses to the stimulus
letters as shown in the Anderson (1965) norms.
While the technique of the present study does
not provide complete experimental control over
the mediators used, it probably provides a
greater degree of control than occurs when the
mediating association which E attempts to
build in through training must compete with a
natural language mediator imported into the
experimental situation by 5".
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(Received February 7, 1968)