Goals, inferential comprehension, and recall of stories by children?

Abstract

Inferential comprehension and recall of stories by children, 5 and 8 years of age, were studied where the story protagonist's motivation and other referential information crucial to understanding the story were varied. The inclusion of negative or positive protagonist's goals versus a “neutral” goal led to qualitatively different and better inferential comprehension as measured by probe questions. However, these manipulations did not affect how well the children recalled the stories. In addition, when the children in the two age groups were matched for retrieval of propositions crucial to the inferences, the older children made more inferences. These data suggest that inferential comprehension may be independent of surface recall of text and that inference probes are better measures of comprehension than free recall measures.