Developmental Patterns of Free Recall and Frequency Judgement in Korean and American Students

Abstract

Four experiments were conducted to compare developmental changes in free recall and frequency judgement. In Experiment 1, 1012 Korean students were shown a series of animal names and then asked to recall them and to estimate the frequency with which they had occurred. The poorest performance on both tasks was by primary-school students and the best by secondary-school students; college students were intermediate in performance. Essentially similar results were obtained in Experiment 2, with an additional 288 Korean students, except that secondary-school students did not perform better than college students. In this experiment, there was complete control of item specificity over frequency and any possible clustering effect was eliminated by using unrelated words rather than animal names. In Experiment 3, the developmental trends in frequency judgement were replicated with 193 American students. Those developmental trends were obtained with another 186 American students in Experiment 4 using relative frequency judgements. Retrospective reports about how frequency judgements were made suggested a developmental shift from more literal counting strategies to more intuitive strength impression judgements. The results are interpreted as suggesting the need for some modification of the Hasher and Zacks (1979, 1984) age-invariance proposition for frequency judgement.