Serial and Free Recall in Children Can Be Improved by Training

Abstract

Children were assigned to three groups given training on unfamiliar words—phoneme-awareness training, rhyme training, and vocabulary training—and an untrained control group. Before and after training, we assessed the children’s performance on serial- and free-recall tasks with these words, as well as their ability to define the words, manipulate phonemes in them, and generate rhymes for them. We found that phoneme-awareness training improved serial recall substantially and improved free recall to a lesser extent. In contrast, vocabulary training produced a substantial increase in free recall and a lesser increase in serial recall. These effects on recall were specific and did not generalize to untrained words. Rhyme training produced increases in rhyming skills but no increase in either serial or free recall. We argue that serial and free recall depend on common memory mechanisms, but serial recall relies more on phonological codes and free recall relies more on semantic codes.