The Effects of Repetitive Story Structure on Story Comprehension in Early Childhood.

Abstract

To investigate young children's story comprehension, two experiments were conducted using two simple animated stories. Both stories were about the same length, but they had different structures, i.e., similar episodes were repeated for one story but not for the other. In Experiment I, just after watching the animation, children ages two to four were asked to recall the stories. The story with similar episodes was recalled at a higher rate among three-and four-year olds, but the two-year olds' recall rate was low for both stories. They made many errors mainly because they reconstructed the story during recall according to their past experiences. In Experiment II, children ages two to five recalled the stories, and the accuracy of their use of causal relationships was analyzed. Two-year old children's recall was not accurate for either story, and the recall of three-and four-year old children was accurate only for the story which repeated similar episodes. Only five-year old children's recall was accurate in its use of causal relationships for both stories.