Children's Ability to Comprehend Text

1983

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypotheses that the ability to draw inferences from a text about an unstated agent is based on the' quality of information available to the reader, and that the quality of the information is itself based on the unique nature of cues embedded in the text and On,'the relevance of prior knowledge held by the reader. In the first experiment, 20 second and 20 fourth grade students listened to stories that contained a helpful (unique) or unhelpful (nonunique) clue and then drew inferences. In the second experiment, 28 third and 28 fourth grade students listened to stories with clues that varied as in the first experiment. In addition, half of the students first received a relevant prior knowledge and half received an irrelevant prior knowledge treatment. Both experiments confirmed that the unique nature of an embedded clue was directly related to the ease of drawing an inference. In addition, relevant prior knowledge was shown to enhance inference making in an additive, linear-fashion. No grade differences were .found. (Stories used in the-experiments are included.) (FL) 4

Learning and Individual Differences

We investigated online processing of causal relations in beginning first (L1) and second language (L2) readers (8-10 years old). By means of eye-tracking, we measured children's processing times of two-clause sentences including a causal relation. Two text-related factors were investigated: coherence marking (i.e., presence vs. absence of the Dutch connective omdat 'because') and linear order of clauses (i.e., cause-effect vs. effect-cause). In addition, syntactic knowledge was included as a child-related factor of interest. The results showed that coherence marking and individual differences in syntactic knowledge influenced children's online sentence processing. In contrast to L1 readers, the absence of a connective led to longer sentence processing times for L2 readers with lower syntactic knowledge; they experienced more difficulty with processing sentences in which no connective was present. Apparently, L2 readers with limited syntactic knowledge benefit from coherence marking provided by a connective, which allows them to establish the causal coherence relation between clauses in a more efficient way. Reversing the linear order of clauses did not affect children's online sentence processing. This study provides an initial step towards the use of online measures to examine sentence processing in beginning L1 and L2 readers aimed at gaining more insight into L2 reading comprehension difficulties.

Journal of Literacy Research, 1979

The basic question asked by this study was, "Do mistakes made while reading interfere with comprehension?" A secondary aim was to clarify the competing views of Gough (1972) who argues that the unskilled reader would not make hypotheses about what words in the text should be, and Goodman [1976a], who argues that the generation of tentative hypotheses about meaning is an inevitable part of the reading process. Three experiments were conducted. The first two were simulations in which skilled readers, about 9 years of age, read stories which varied according to embedded error type, difficulty, error rate, text access, and set strength. The third experiment was a naturalistic comparison study, using unskilled readers. Overall, the results offered support for both Gough and Goodman, depending on the kind of comprehension tested and the criterion for acceptability of responses. It seems that accuracy is necessary for atomistic precision; less so for global interpretation.

In this review of literature we examine empirical research of individual differences in younger readers' knowledge and use of expository text structures. The goal of this review is to explore the influence of reader and text characteristics in order to better understand the instructional needs of elementary school readers. First we review research which has examined the influence of two textual characteristics: the hierarchical organization of macro-and micro-level propositions and the type of text structure (e.g. collection, comparison, problem-and-solution). Then we review research of three reader characteristics: overall comprehension skill, age, and prior knowledge and how their influences may vary in relation to the aforementioned text characteristics. Our review of research suggests that readers of all ages may benefit from explicit instruction in text structure, particularly less-skilled comprehenders. Text structure instruction should focus on highly structured texts like comparison, causation, and problem-and-solution.

1995

A study examined how elementary school children spontaneously construct meaning when reading informational text. In particular, the study explored: what kinds of knowledge they draw on and how they use it to help them understand what they read; and how does what they do influence what they recall. Twenty-nine 6th graders from two elementary schools in Nashville, Tennessee, were taught to think aloud as they tried to understand novel information. Subjects' thinking processes were observed as the children read non-narrative informational texts on science and nutrition on a computer screen. These texts were 21-27 sentences in length. Analysis of data showed that children did not take a passive approach to reading. Instead, they drew on prior knowledge and experience to construct a coherent representation of the text information, although a coherent representation did not necessarily mean an accurate one. Children also used other activities to make sense of new information. Some of these activities were: monitoring, integrating across texts, and paraphrasing or rephrasing content. Further research into the nature of students' representations and the relationship of these representations to recall reports is needed. (The experimental texts are appended.) (JW)

Journal of Child Language, 2005

Two studies investigating young readers' use of conjunctions are reported. In Study One, 145 eight-to ten-year-olds completed one of two narrative cloze tasks in which different types of conjunction were deleted. Performance for additive conjunctions was not affected by age in this study, but older children were more likely to select the target conjunction than were younger children for temporal, causal, and adversative terms. Performance was superior in the cloze task in which they were given a restricted choice of responses (three vs. seven). In Study Two, 35 eight-and nine-year-old good and poor comprehenders completed the three-choice cloze task. The poor comprehenders were less likely to select the target terms in general. Sentence-level comprehension skills did not account for their poor performance. The results indicate that understanding of the semantic relations expressed by conjunctions is still developing long after these terms are used correctly [*] Study

In this chapter we consider the nature and the source of difficulties experienced by children with a specific type of comprehension deficit, children who have developed age-appropriate word reading skills but whose reading comprehension skills lag behind. As discussed elsewhere in this volume, text comprehension is a complex task that involves many different cognitive skills and processes. Consequently, there are many different aspects of the reading process where difficulties may arise, which may, in turn, contribute to these children's poor comprehension. In this chapter, we examine the evidence that impairments at the word-, sentence-, and discourse-level playa causal role in this population's comprehension difficulties. In addition, we consider whether deficits in cognitive abilities such as memory skills and general intelligence, and factors such as amount of exposure to print, contribute to poor comprehension. I In this context, we use the term decoding to refer to word recognition in general, which may be accomplished, for example, by recoding from graphemes to phonemes, by sight recognition, or by analogy (e.g. Ehri, 1999).

Journal of Literacy Research, 1981

This study was designed to examine the effects of two different discourse types upon the amount and kind of explicit and inferred information in the free and probed recalls of good and poor third grade readers following their reading of a selection with expository/informative tendencies and a selection with narrative/entertaining tendencies. Findings indicated that different text types do influence the amount and kind of information recalled by good and poor readers in that both groups recalled a higher proportion of explicitly stated information, generated more connectors, and were better able to preserve the original order of propositions in the narrative than in the expository selections. Reader ability level also produced some general differences in recall across discourse types in that good readers recalled more explicit information and generated more inferred information than poor readers. Furthermore, good readers' tendency to include most of the explicit information they remembered in their free recalls and to generate inferred information primarily in response to probes indicates that they may possess greater metacognitive awareness and are better able to separate explicit and inferred information. However, within groups the effects were not stable across text type and reader ability level for individual readers who frequently varied considerably in the amount and kind of explicit and inferred information recalled after reading the two types of texts. Thus, it was concluded that it is not possible to reliably predict an individual's recall patterns from one type of text to another due to the potential influence of a variety of specific text and reader characteristics within varying contextual situations.

Journal of Teaching Language Skills, 2012

This study examined the establishment of coherence relations by Persian EFL learners in their reading of stories. 201 undergraduate EFL learners read narrative passages and selected appropriate coherence elements of different types necessary for the proper construction of meaning. The results demonstrated a consistent pattern of a text-specific hierarchy for the comprehension of conjunctive relations across learners with different proficiency levels. More specifically, adversatives were found to be the easiest connectors by all the three groups followed by causals as the second easiest, then sequentials as the third and more difficult, and additives as the most difficult markers. The results have both theoretical and practical applications and implications for the ‘model building’ hypotheses on the one hand, and reading comprehension and instruction on the other.

British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 2003

This study investigated the relation between children's text comprehension, their ability to produce a coherent and cohesive story, and the extent to which external cues aid these aspects of narrative production. Children with reading comprehension difficulties demonstrated deficits in both aspects of story organization, relative to sameage skilled comprehenders and younger children of equivalent comprehension ability. Their performance was poor when a topic title was used to elicit the narrative, but performance improved when stories were elicited with more informative verbal and pictorial prompts. Stories with poorer structures did not contain proportionately fewer connectives in general, but the type of connective included differed in relation to story event structure. These findings are discussed in relation to the use of coherence and cohesion in narratives and their relation to comprehension skill.

Journal of Educational Psychology, 1970

Three broad categories of comprehension skills (sentence, anaphora, and intersentence syntax) were divided into a total Of 55 separate skills. Two different sentences or sentence pairs were written to incorporate each of the structures studied, and a four-or five-sentence paragraph was then written to incorporate each of these. Four question types (rote, transform, semantic substitute, and compound) were used to test comprehension of the structures; therefore, four test forms using these different question types were made for each paragraph. The subjects, fourth graders from an inner dty, a suburban, and a rural school, were randomly divided so that 60 students responded to each question. The mean percentage of the students correctly answering the sentence comprehension questions was 73 percent; the anaphora comprehension questions, 77 percent; and the intersentence questions, 58 percent. The structures identified seemed to represent homogenous classes of. behavior since the variation between questions measuring different skills was significantly greater than the variation between items measuring the same skill. The fact that the structures and question types differed. significantly in difficulty was also taken as evidence that many of these skills may be hierarchically related. Tables and references are included. (CM)

Journal of Educational Psychology, 1988

This paper reports two experiments that investigated whether elementary school children's difficulties in detecting inconsistencies in text are related to their failure to represent each of two inconsistent propositions in memory or to their failure to compare the representations of the inconsistent propositions to each other once each has been represented in memory. Overall, the experiments considered three kinds of inconsistencies--falsehoods (a textual proposition conflicts with a potentially known fact), factual contradictions (one textual proposition conflicts with another textual proposition and one of these propositions is a potentially known fact) and textual contradictions (one textual proposition conflicts within a second textual proposition and neither is a known fact). In Experiment 1, first, third, and fifth grade children (N = 80) were asked to detect familiar falsehoods and unfamiliar factual contradictions in narratives. Results showed that the familiar falsehoods were easier to detect than the unfamiliar factual contradictions. In Experiment 2 (N = 30), however, when the familiarity variable was controlled, no differences in inconsistency detection were observed between falsehoods, factual contradictions, and textual contradictions. In addition, in both experiments an analysis of the recall protocols indicated that detection failures were related more to incomplete recall of the inconsistent information than to difficulty in comparing the inconsistent propositions. The results indicated that children's inconsistency detection failures are related more to difficulties in forming accurate mental representations of textual propositions than to difficulties in comparing the inconsistent information once it is represented in memory. It was suggested that greater attention should be paid to the conditions that facilitate text representation, since those conditions are likely to affect comprehension monitoring as well.

Reading and Writing, 2015

Narratives typically consist of information on multiple aspects of a situation. In order to successfully create a coherent representation of the described situation, readers are required to monitor all these situational dimensions during reading. However, little is known about whether these dimensions differ in the ease with which they can be monitored. In the present study, we examined whether children in Grades 4 and 6 monitor four different dimensions (i.e., emotion, causation, time, and space) during reading, using a self-paced reading task containing inconsistencies. Furthermore, to explore what causes failure in inconsistency detection, we differentiated between monitoring processes related to availability and validation of information by manipulating the distance between two pieces of conflicting information. The results indicated that the monitoring processes varied as a function of dimension. Children were able to validate emotional and causal information when it was still active in working memory, but this was not the case for temporal and spatial information. When context and target information were more distant from each other, only emotionally charged information remained available for further monitoring processes. These findings show that the influence of different situational dimensions should be taken into account when studying children's reading comprehension.

Reading Research Quarterly, 1977

To ascertain whether subjects spanning the range of reading acquisition exhibit semantic ccnstructivity when ccnfronted with a silent reading task, a study was conducted involving 120 second, fifth, and seventh graders, and 30 graduate students. For purposes of the study, semantic constructivity was defined es the uncued production of inferences based cn one's knowledge of spatial relationships and reflecting semantic descripticns lccated in separate statements in a text. The subjects were tested using an "acquisition/false recognition" paradigm comparing their recognition memory for sentences with identical deep structure but which differed in the semantic descriptions suggested. The primary result vas the strong tendency for all subjects to "rcccgnize" the semantically congruent inferences present in the recognition task as having been present in the original acquisition situaticn. The findings support the psy cholinquistic studies of miscues in cral reading which characterize reading as a constructive rather than an interpretive process. These findings imply that further research should to toward a reconsideration of theories and questions cf readability. Additional research might consider the type of constructive activity that readers of differing ages exhibit. However, the strongest implication is support for the reemphasis cf reading as a language-based process.

Reading Research Quarterly, 1974

This study was designed 1) to provide an assessment of linguistic variables which affect the way in which children process verbal data when they read, and 2) to evaluate certain explicit and implicit claims emerging from research and opinion in the areas of readability analysis and psycholinguistics. A repeated measurement design for high and average achieving third and fourth graders yielded data which indicate that grammatical complexity is often an aid to comprehension and recall rather than a hindrance. The results are discussed in light of the implications they provide for writing children's reading material, further readability analysis, and developing models of performance for language users.