The purpose of this study was to investigate children's failure to use category labels as cues in the recall of conceptually related items. Previous research has shown that despite the fact that the use of these labels as cues increases recall, children do not use them unless constrained to do so by the experimenter. The premise of this investigation was that young children fail to use cues because they are not kept in active memory during the recall process. Therefore, it was predicted that ensuring the presence of category labels in active memory would improve amount of recall. In order to determine the degree of assistance needed by children to keep the category labels in active memory during recall, three recall conditions were constructed which varied in the amount of assistance they gave in the task of remembering
