Children’s Narrative Retells: The Influence of Character Realism and Storybook Theme on Central and Peripheral Detail

Abstract

ABSTRACT Research Findings: Anthropomorphized animal characters have been associated with negative influences on educational outcomes for young children, for example story comprehension and prosocial learning from moral tales. In this study we investigate how character realism and moral theme influence young children’s recall of the story content. Retells were examined for length, syntactic complexity, and centrality as indices of memory and understanding. Participants were 171 children (age 3–7 years) from 6 rural schools in the Northwest of England. We found no significant influence of story character on the measures under test. Retells with a prosocial sharing theme had higher syntactic complexity and greater centrality than those with a busy theme. Practice or Policy: The results suggest that animal characters are not necessarily an impediment to coherent representations of stories. The central message from a prosocial themed story appeared to be more strongly retained than that of a closely matched story with no prosocial lesson. This suggests story theme to be a potential influence that should be considered when testing children’s narrative comprehension.