Transfer in free-recall learning of overlapping lists of nonsense words

The Ss were required to learn a list of eight nonsense words which was a subset from a total set of 16, and then to learn another subset of eight which contained four words from the original list. Learning difficulty was found to be determined almost entirely by whether the internal structure of the subset was simple or complex. No facilitation in learning the second subset was found. Interference occurred when both the first and second subsets had one simple contingency between two letter positions and both contingencies involved a letter position in common. It is concluded that facilitation will occur only when the total learning task involves a meaningful total set of words, with a structure of the subsets perceived as related to the structure of the total set.