Abstract
In this study we investigated the relation between young children’s comprehension skill and inferencemaking ability using a procedure that controlled individual differences in general knowledge (Barnes & Dennis, 1998; Barnes, Dennis, & Haefele-Kalvaitis, 1996). A multiepisode story was read to the children, and their ability to make two types of inference was assessed: coherence inferences, which were essential for adequate comprehension of the text, and elaborative inferences, which enhanced the text representation but which were not crucial to understanding. There was a strong relation between comprehension skill and inference-making ability even when knowledge was equally available to all participants. Subsidiary analyses of the source of inference failures revealed different underlying sources of difficulty for good and poor comprehenders.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ackerman, B. P., Silver, D., &Glickman, I. (1990). Concept availability in the causal inferences of children and adults.Child Development,61, 230–246.
Barnes, M. A., &Dennis, M. (1996). Reading comprehension deficits arise from diverse sources: Evidence from readers with and without developmental brain pathology. In C. Cornoldi & J. V. Oakhill (Eds.),Reading comprehension difficulties: Processes and interventions (pp. 251–278). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Barnes, M. A., &Dennis, M. (1998). Discourse after early-onset hydrocephalus: Core deficits in children of average intelligence.Brain & Language,61, 309–334.
Barnes, M. A., Dennis, M., &Haefele-Kalvaitis, J. (1996). The effects of knowledge availability and knowledge accessibility on coherence and elaborative inferencing in children from six to fifteen years of age.Journal of Experimental Child Psychology,61, 216–241.
Beck, I. L., Perfetti, C. A., &McKeown, M. G. (1982). Effects of longterm vocabulary instruction on lexical access and reading comprehension.Journal of Educational Psychology,74, 506–521.
Cain, K., &Oakhill, J. V. (1999). Inference making and its relation to comprehension failure.Reading & Writing,11, 489–503.
Cain, K., & Oakhill, J. V. (in press). Reading comprehension difficulties. In P. E. Bryant & T. Nunes (Eds.),International handbook of children’s reading. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Carroll, J. B. (1993).Human cognitive abilities: A survey of factoranalytic studies. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Casteel, M. A. (1993). Effects of inference necessity and reading goal on children’s inference generation.Developmental Psychology,29, 346–357.
Casteel, M. A., &Simpson, G. B. (1991). Textual coherence and the development of inferential generation skills.Journal of Research in Reading,14, 116–129.
Cohen, J. (1988).Statistical power analysis for behavioral sciences (2nd ed.). New York: Academic Press.
Garnham, A. (1982). Testing psychological theories about inference making.Memory & Cognition,10, 341–349.
Garnham, A. (1989). Inference in language understanding: What, when, why and how. In R. Dietrich & C. F. Graumann (Eds.),Language processing in social context (pp. 153–172). Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Garnham, A., &Oakhill, J. V. (1996). The mental models theory of language comprehension. In B. K. Britton & A. C. Graesser (Eds.),Models of understanding text (pp. 313–339). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Graesser, A. C., Singer, M., &Trabasso, T. (1994). Constructing inferences during narrative text comprehension.Psychological Review,101, 371–395.
Long, D. L., Oppy, B. J., &Seely, M. R. (1997). Individual differences in readers’ sentence- and text-level representations.Journal of Memory & Language,36, 129–145.
MacGinitie, W. H., &MacGinitie, R. K. (1989).Gates-MacGinitie reading tests. Chicago: Riverside.
Marr, M. B., &Gormley, K. (1982). Children’s recall of familiar and unfamiliar text.Reading Research Quarterly,18, 89–104.
Nation, K., &Snowling, M. J. (1998). Semantic processing and the development of word-recognition skills: Evidence from children with reading comprehension difficulties.Journal of Memory & Language,39, 85–101.
Neale, M. D. (1989).The Neale analysis of reading ability—Revised British edition. Windsor: NFER-Nelson.
Oakhill, J. V. (1982). Constructive processes in skilled and less-skilled comprehenders’ memory for sentences.British Journal of Psychology,73, 13–20.
Oakhill, J. V. (1984). Inferential and memory skills in children’s comprehension of stories.British Journal of Educational Psychology,54, 31–39.
Oakhill, J. V. (1996). Mental models in children’s text comprehension. In J. V. Oakhill & A. Garnham (Eds.),Mental models in cognitive science: Essays in honour of Phil Johnson-Laird (pp. 77–94). Hove, U.K.: Psychology Press.
Omanson, R. C., Warren, W. M., &Trabasso, T. (1978). Goals, inferential comprehension and recall of stories by children.Discourse Processes,1, 337–354.
Paris, S. G., &Lindauer, B. K. (1976). The role of inference in children’s comprehension and memory for sentences.Cognitive Psychology,8, 217–227.
Paris, S. G., &Upton, L. R. (1976). Children’s memory for inferential relations in prose.Child Development,47, 660–668.
Perfetti, C. A. (1985).Reading ability. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shankweiler, D. (1989). How problems of comprehension are related to difficulties in decoding. In D. Shankweiler & I.Y. Liberman (Eds.),Phonology and reading disability: Solving the reading puzzle (pp. 35–68). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Singer, M. (1994). Discourse inference processes. In M.A. Gernsbacher (Ed.),Handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 479–515). San Diego: Academic Press.
van den Broek, P. (1994). Comprehension and memory of narrative texts: Inferences and coherence. In M.A. Gernsbacher (Ed.),Handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 539–588). San Diego: Academic Press.
Whitney, P., Ritchie, B. G., &Clark, M. B. (1991). Working-memory capacity and the use of elaborative inferences in text comprehension.Discourse Processes,14, 133–145.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
The study reported in this paper was supported by Economic and Social Research Council Grant R000 23 5438 awarded to J.V.O. and P.E.B.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Cain, K., Oakhill, J.V., Barnes, M.A. et al. Comprehension skill, inference-making ability, and their relation to knowledge. Memory & Cognition 29, 850–859 (2001). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196414
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196414