This study aimed to identify reading behavior profiles in nine-to-eleven year old children based on their think-aloud responses while reading narrative and expository texts. Three profiles emerged... Show moreThis study aimed to identify reading behavior profiles in nine-to-eleven year old children based on their think-aloud responses while reading narrative and expository texts. Three profiles emerged while reading narratives: Literal Readers, who stay close to the literal text by predominantly repeating it; Paraphrasing Readers, who extract meaning from the text by paraphrasing it; and Elaborating Readers, who use background knowledge to explain the text by generating inferences. The three profiles also emerged while reading expository text. Children generally exhibited the same profiles across the two text genres, however, expository texts elicited fewer correct inferences but more invalid inferences than did narratives, suggesting that children are influenced by text demands. Elaborating Readers had better word decoding skills, reading comprehension ability, and non-verbal reasoning ability than readers of the two other profiles, indicating a positive relation between inference generation and language abilities and cognitive resources. Show less
Pavias, M.; Broek, P.W. van den; Hickendorff, M.; Beker, K.; Leijenhorst, L. van 2016
This study examined the contributions of developmental changes in social-cognitive ability throughout adolescence to the development of narrative comprehension. We measured the effects of... Show moreThis study examined the contributions of developmental changes in social-cognitive ability throughout adolescence to the development of narrative comprehension. We measured the effects of sensitivity to the causal structure of narratives and of sensitivity to differences in social-cognitive processing demands on narrative recall by children (8–10 years old), adolescents (13–15 years old), and adults (19–21 years old). Generalized mixed-effects models for dichotomous variables revealed that social-cognitive processing demands of story elements predicted differences in narrative recall between the age groups, over and above the causal importance of story elements. Children's and adolescents' recall of the narrative differed from that of adults, and these differences were most apparent for social-cognitive aspects of the narrative. These findings suggest that immature social-cognitive abilities limit narrative comprehension in childhood and adolescence and, in doing so, contribute to our understanding of the interaction between reader characteristics and text characteristics in the development of narrative comprehension. Show less
