Psychology

Verbal learning is a field or discipline in experimental psychology that involves the study of particular verbal associations as well as acquisition of the associations. It is getting hold of verbal information and retaining it. It can be referred to as memorization in daily terms. There have been studies about how people acquire knowledge through connecting or associating things that are repeatedly occurring closely together in a given time. Verbal learning consists of primarily two undertakings which are serial learning and paired-associate learning. Serial learning is learning to reproduce the articles or items in a certain list in their original and exact order such as learning the letters of an alphabet. On the other hand, paired-associate learning involves learning in order to make or create a verbal response upon the presence of a particular stimulus like learning a unfamiliar language vocabulary wherein the stimulus would be the foreign term and the response is the English word. Associations are ultimately formed by means of conditioning. Both serial and paired-associate learning go hand in hand and is simply like memorizing a password or mnemonics.

Mnemonics are techniques or devices, such as a rhyme or an image, that serve to enhance the storage and the recall of information contained in memory (Solso, 1995). Mnemonics may be visual or verbal in nature. There are different kinds of verbal mnemonics coding, first-letter, and story method. Coding mnemonics are best for memorizing figures or numbers while first-letter mnemonics are best effective when learning an order of learned information. Story method on the other hand is best used in learning lists effectively. Some of the most well-known verbal mnemonics include the SOHCAHTOA which stands for Sine, Cosine, Tangent, the three trigonometric functions.