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