Elsevier

Cognitive Development

Volume 22, Issue 3, July–September 2007, Pages 323-340
Cognitive Development

Understanding the glue of narrative structure: Children's on- and off-line inferences about characters’ goals

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2007.02.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Because characters’ goals play a key role in the structure of narratives, the ability to make inferences about goals is essential to narrative comprehension. Despite their importance, no previous studies have examined the process by which children make these goal inferences. In the current study, we examined 6- and 8-year-old children's goal inference making processes through think-aloud protocols. We also examined the product of comprehension, the mental representation of text, through free recall and comprehension questions. The results revealed that children of both ages regularly made appropriate goal inferences while listening to narratives. In addition, the number of goal inferences predicted children's recall of the stories. Thus, children as young as 6 years old are sensitive to the vital role of characters’ goals in narrative structure, and they can engage in sophisticated cognitive processing while they listen to narratives to form coherent mental representations of them.

Section snippets

Narrative structure

Characters’ goals provide coherence both within and between narrative episodes. A character's goal is conceptually connected to most of the elements of a single episode (Mandler & Johnson, 1977; Stein & Glenn, 1979). In a typical episode, the main character's goal will motivate most of his or her actions, and these efforts will result in either success or failure in achieving the goal, marking the end of the episode. Furthermore, goals often provide coherence in multi-episodic narratives by

Participants

Twenty-five 6-year-old children and twenty-four 8-year-old children participated in the study. The data from one 6-year-old girl were eliminated because she had been exposed to one of the narratives before the session. The data from one 8-year-old boy was also eliminated because he failed to complete the tasks in the session. Thus, the final sample included twenty-four 6-year-olds (11 female) (mean age = 6.71 years, range: 6.38–6.81 years) and twenty-three 8-year-olds (11 female) (mean age = 8.57

Results

Preliminary analyses revealed that there were no main effects of presentation order of the narratives and no interactions with this variable. Effect sizes (η2) are reported for each significant finding.

Discussion

The primary purpose of this study was to explore children's developing ability to make goal inferences while comprehending narrative texts. In support of our first hypothesis, significant differences in goal inference making between the goal- and non-goal-directed narrative versions demonstrated that children made appropriate goal inferences as they proceeded through the narrative. In the goal-directed narratives, even the younger children regularly made inferences to connect characters’

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grants from the Center for the Improvement of Reading Achievement (CIERA), the Center for Cognitive Sciences, University of Minnesota, and from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD-07151). Paul van den Broek received support through the Golestan and Lorentz fellowships from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and from the Guy Bond Endowment for Reading Research, University of Minnesota.

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