Facilitation of serial recall in retarded children and adolescents: verbal and kinesthetic strategies.

The nature of the modality-specific effects of rehearsal training for serial recall was explored. Retarded children and adolescents were trained in either verbal or kinesthetic "cumulative rehearsal--fast finish" strategies for picture recall. Results indicated that both strategies facilitated recall on training tasks and on a transfer-recall test. No age effects or Age X Rehearsal Condition interaction resulted. These results provide support for a general cross-modality recoding explanation of rehearsal effects and suggest that retarded individuals are as capable of mediating picture recall in their sensorimotor system as well as in their verbal-auditory memory system.