Abstract
This study aimed to clarify how elementary-school readers comprehend manga stories. According to van Dijk & Kintsch's (1983) model of reading comprehension, people can construct three distinct levels of text representation: the surface form, the propositional textbase, and the situation model. Based on this model, we investigated whether this tri-partite distinction might be applicable to the comprehension of manga stories. Sixty-three children (11- to 12-year-old sixth graders) read a manga story and a text-only story and completed comprehension tests for both. The results demonstrate that, for both manga and text-only readings, surface form test performance affects situation-model construction and these effects are serially mediated by performance for textbase representation, indicating that van Dijk and Kintsch’s model is applicable to the comprehension of manga, in addition to text-only readings. A correlational analysis and Bayes factor tests showed significant associations between manga and text-only reading for textbase and situation-model levels of memory performance, whereas there was no association with memory performance at the surface-form level. Based on these insights, similarities and differences of comprehension ability between manga reading and text-only reading are discussed.
