Temporal organization in children's strategy formation.

It is well established that children use study behaviors such as card sorting, category naming, and item-by-item rehearsal to assist subsequent word recall. In this article, we provide evidence that these behaviors are organized into coherent temporal patterns. Fourier analyses of individual behaviors over a sequence of five consecutive study/recall trials indicated that sorting was synchronized with the start of each trial, whereas rehearsal tended to occur later in each trial. Fourier analyses of pairs of behaviors indicated that sorting and category naming, both concerned with categorization of the to-be-remembered words, co-occurred early in each trial at a greater rate than expected based on their individual frequencies of occurrence (i.e., they were used cooperatively). In contrast, verbal rehearsal of individual words co-occurred with both sorting and category naming at a lesser rate than would be expected based on their individual frequencies of occurrence. The results thus point to a global strategy in which children learn the items' categories before they learn them individually. There was little apparent qualitative difference in temporal organization for second- and fourth-grade children. However, sorting early in each trial was more pronounced for children with better word recall (regardless of grade), and the suppressed co-occurrence of rehearsal with sorting and category naming (i.e., keeping category learning temporally separate from item learning) was more pronounced for the fourth-grade children.