Compound stimuli in paired-associate learning

In several paired-associate (PA) tasks, triads of words served as stimuli. The associative relationship between the words of a triad was systematically varied. Words of each H (horizontal) triad were interassociated, while those of the I (independent) triads were not. Words of the V (vertical) triads were associated with words of other V triads but not with each other. In Experiment I, 30 Ss learned each type of item. Performance on the H items was facilitated, and that on the V items was hindered (p <.001). Experiment II (N = 30) replicated this result and provided control data with single-word stimuli. PA performance with stimulus triads was always poorer than that with single-word stimuli (p <.001). Experiment III (N = 60) examined the generality of these results. A single view of PA learning is proposed to integrate several interpretations of the results, and implications for serial learning are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).