Materials
The twenty-eight targets used in the present study were the same as those in Toyota and Kita (2010) and were selected from a normative set (Kitao, Hatta, Ishida, Babazono, & Kondo, 1977). Table 1 lists all of the target words. Each target was written in a Japanese Kanji character that was familiar to the participants. Targets were listed on PowerPoint slides. Each target was placed on upper part of a slide; beneath the target, a word (person or word) indicating the type of information each participant was asked to generate was presented. Two types of lists were provided. Each list comprised fourteen slides of targets for both the social elaboration and semantic elaboration conditions. For the first list, the targets on the left side of Table 1 were assigned to the social elaboration condition and those on the right side were assigned to the semantic elaboration condition. For the second list, the assignment of target words to each condition was reversed. In each list, all target words were presented once and one buffer slide was presented in the first and last serial positions during list learning.
Table 1
Targets (kanji words) used in the present study