The ontogeny of abstracting information from narrative discourse

This study documents and attempts to account for the way children at the end of early childhood and in the mid-period of middle childhood abstract and use information from narrative discourse. To this end, kindergarten and third grade children were aurally exposed to two narratives differing in structural characteristics. Subsequent performance on three tasks was then compared. The tasks consisted of: retelling the narratives, answering questions about explicit and implicit information, and sequencing pictorially represented events. For both grades, matched groups were tested under four experimental conditions involving variations in the provision of visual aids during the story presentation and retelling phases. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons of performance on each task were made between grades, stories, and among experimental conditions.

Results revealed that third grade children displayed a consistently superior performance, compared with kindergarten children, on most measures across tasks. These differences were particularly marked when aids were not provided. Substantially greater relative gains with the provision of visual aids were obtained for kindergarten than for third grade children. Unaided kindergarten children performed very poorly on all tasks in comparison with all other groups. However, their performance improved substantially when visual aids were provided at both the presentation and retelling phases, and particularly at the former. Unaided third graders, on the other hand, performed much better than unaided kindergarten children, although their performance improved significantly with visual aids at presentation, but not at retelling.

Story type effects varied substantially with grade and experimental condition, and across tasks, exhibiting subtle factor- and task-specific effects. In general, poorer performance was observed on some measures across tasks for the more loosely than for the more tightly structured story. Some of these effects were only apparent through qualitative analyses, however. Text characteristics other than structure also appeared important in determining story type effects.

Results point to a developmental improvement in several operations used to abstract information from narrative discourse. In addition to acquiring logical concepts, children appear to develop the ability to use independently appropriate strategies to abstract information, during both acquisition and subsequent use of the acquired information to perform tasks. While younger children appeared to depend on the information being organized, third graders displayed greater ability and flexibility in handling less organized information. In addition, ability to derive non-explicit information was particularly apparent in the older children.

The underdeveloped logical concepts of the younger children may well contribute to their difficulties in abstracting information from prose, but do not seem to be the exclusive locus of them. A failure to apply independently appropriate strategies at different phases, particularly organizational ones, appears to play a significant part. These children may also be more able to capitalize on logical relations, and less bound by their conceptual limitations, than is commonly assumed. Some of their psycholinguistic capabilities also seemed better developed than is often suggested.

Results support the argument that psycholinguistic phenomena as complex as the abstraction of information should be investigated within a wider framework which takes due account of subtle interactions among many relevant variables. They also highlight the value of making fine-grained analyses of several dependent variables. The findings have significant methodological and educational implications. An experimental method of presenting stories is offered which allowed for control of important variables, and was motivating. In addition, methods could be derived from the present experimental procedures to help children deal more effectively with prose.