The purpose of the study was to investigate the effectiveness of the superordinate and subordinate words as mediators in mediate association learning across three different age groups in the A-B, B-C, A-C mediation x paradigm. The effects of sex difference, high and low levels of associational fluency, as well as a type of pre-training which was done by requiring subjects to create associations to the mediating B terms, were considered. The subjects used were, 50 fourth graders (22 boys and 28 girls), 54 seventh graders (26 boys and 28 girls), and 51 tenth graders (22 boys and 29 girls), for a total of 155 students. Each group of subjects was divided into high and low associational fluency groups using the cutting point. The high and low associational fluency groups were divided further into two groups each using the odd-even method on the ranks on the associational fluency scores. Prior to the mediate association learning task, one group received the pre-training procedure while the other received the no-pre-training procedure where each subject was simply required to write a short story. The learning materials consisted of superordinate and subordinate words, and high association value nonsense syllables. Two sets of A-B, B-C, A-C, mediate association learning task were constructed using superordinate words as B terms in one set and subordinate words as B terms in the other, while the same nonsense syllables were used as the A and C terms in both sets. Each set of the learning task consisted of two 12 paired-associate lists, half of which was used as the experimental pairs with the other half as the control pairs. Each list of paired-associates was presented one pair at a time for five seconds for seven trials. Each subject received both sets of the learning task and served as his own control. The multiple-choice method was used to measure the amount of mediation. The results of the experiments were as follows: Mediation was obtained with both the superordinate and subordinate words as mediators when subjects in the fourth, seventh and tenth grades were each treated as a single group, with the exception of the fourth grade group when the superordinate words were used as mediators. In general, when subjects were treated on the subgroup basis, mediation was obtained increasingly with age. The pre-training method was not superior to the no-pre-training (control) method in producing mediation. In fact, on the seventh grade level with superordinate words as mediators, the pre-training group was inferior to the control group in producing mediation. Superordinate words were not more effective mediators than subordinate words. There was a trend which indicated that subordinate words were more effective mediators than the superordinate words with the increasing age of subjects, especially among female subjects. There was no clear-cut evidence that the high associational fluency level enhanced the occurrence of mediation more than the low associational fluency level when the superordinate words and subordinate words were used as mediators. It was found that age had a definite effect on mediation. The amount of mediation produced occurred increasing with age, at least for the three grade levels compared. There was no sex difference on mediation produced superordinate words as mediators. But with the subordinate words as mediators there were sex difference effects on the amount of mediation produced in favor of female groups on the fourth and tenth grade levels. In conclusion, the results of the study were in agreement with the majority of the findings reported in the literature on mediate association experiments that mediation could be experimentally produced. The superordinate words and subordinate words proved to be about equally effective as mediators and their effectiveness increased with the increasing age of the subjects.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether affect influences mediate association. A second purpose of this experiment was to test whether there could be found an interaction between affect and meaningfulness in the verbal mediation scores. The subjects were all of the students registered for an Educational Psychology class at Utah State University, Spring Quarter, 1969. These students were randomly assigned to one of two groups, designated Phase I or Phase II. Phase I was designed to study the influence of affect upon mediation and the subjects in this group learned two lists of seven paired associates. Phase II was designed to examine the possible interaction of affect and meaningfulness in mediation and the subjects in this group learned two lists of eight paired associates. Phase III was added to the study to determine if there would be a correlation between mediation and association ability of all of the subjects. Affect level was determined by the magnitude of the Galvanic Skin Response readings on Stoelting Psychogalvanoscope in reaction to the mediating words of the B list. Meaningfulness level of the non-mediators was defined as the association value of Consonant-Vowel-Consonant trigrams used in the A-C lists. Mediation was defined as the number of correctly paired A-C trigrams in the multiple-choice mediation test. To test whether affect influences mediation, a comparison was made between mediation scores produced by high affect mediators and mediation scores produced by low affect mediators. The test of the interaction was made by a factorial design with two levels (high, low) of affect and four combinations of levels (high-high, high-low, low-high, and low-low) of meaningfulness. The procedure first assessed the affect level of the mediators. Then either Phase I, which tested Hypothesis 1, or Phase II, which tested Hypothesis 2, was administered to each subject. Each phase followed the chaining model (A-B, B-C, A-C) of mediation. There was no learning of the A-C list, but mediation was tested by pairing the A-C items in a multiple-choice test. Also, a test of association ability was made after presenting twelve paired associates using a similar multiple-choice test to that used to test mediation. Statistical analyses were applied to these test scores to determine the empirical support of the following hypotheses: Hypothesis 1 proposed that there would be a significant difference between the amount of recall scores mediated by high and low affect words when the meaningfulness of the non-mediators is held constant at a medium level. This hypothesis was supported by the data obtained. Hypothesis 2 predicted that there would be an interaction between levels of affect and combinations of levels of meaningfulness. This hypothesis was strongly supported by the data of this study. An additional finding was that a low, but significant correlation was obtained between mediation scores and association scores. The findings of this study showed that affect level of the mediator affects the amount of mediation produced in a chaining paradigm. There appears to be strong evidence for an affect and meaningfulness interaction in mediation data. Within this interaction, there was an indication that affect is prepotent over meaningfulness. Also, analysis of this interaction shows that the meaningfulness of the stimulus term rather than the response term seems to be critical in producing superior mediation. Finally, a low correlation seems to exist between simple or paired association and mediate association, because simple (paired) association and mediate association do not seem to be identical processes.