Response familiarization and the associative phase of paired-associate learning

Performance in a paired-associate (PA) task where response term recall (R) had been eliminated through the use of multiple-choice test trials failed to be facilitated by 20 trials of prior R-term familiarization. These results are seen to favor the view that enhanced R-term availability, not differentiation, accounts for the facilitation of PA performance by R-term familiarization when the PA task requires R-term recall.