Meaningfulness and isolation as factors in verbal learning.

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Abstract
Three experiments on the relationship between meaningfulness and speed of learning are reported. In Experiment I, 40 college students learned paired-associate lists in which different pairs of terms were of different degrees of meaningfulness. The results of this experiment differed from those obtained in previous experiments chiefly in that the terms with least meaning were much easier to learn than would have been predicted from earlier research. This suggested the operation of the isolation factor studied by the gestalt psychologists. Experiment II was performed to determine whether the isolation effect would be greater when the isolated nonsense terms were stimulus terms as compared with response terms. Two groups of 14 Ss learned paired-associate lists in which one term was a very common three- letter word and the other was a disyllabic word from Noble''s list. Of the latter, two were paralogs. One group learned this list with the disyllables as stimulus words; for the other group the three-letter common words were the stimulus words. Results of the experiment confirmed the prediction from the isolation hypothesis that the disyllabic paralogs would be easier to learn as stimuli than as responses. In Experiment III, four groups of 20 Ss learned lists of words which were identical except for the middle term. The middle term varied in meaning-fulness for the four different groups. This manipulation had a marked effect upon the form of the serial position curve. The list which contained a nonsense term in the middle resembled that usually obtained in studies of the isolation phenomenon, showing a dip in the middle. For the other three groups, the serial position curves were more nearly "normal", but in general, the more meaningful the middle term, the harder it was to learn. An S-R interpretation patterned after Gibson''s theory is offered for the results of these experiments.
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