Children's comprehension of narrative texts: Protagonists’ goals and mental representation of coherence relations

Abstract

In two experiments, we examined the effect of emphasizing protagonists’ goals within narrative texts on 8-year-olds’ ability to establish local and global coherence. The children were presented neutral and goal-emphasis versions of short goal-based narratives, either auditorily (Experiment 1, N=40) or audiovisually (auditory + pictures, Experiment 2, N=40). Then, the participants completed a word-recognition task by determining whether query words associated with protagonists’ superordinate or subordinate goals had occurred in the text. Response times served as indicators of global and local coherence. The results indicate that emphasizing protagonists’ goals promotes the process of establishing global (but not local) coherence in auditory texts. A comparable effect did not become apparent when the texts were presented audiovisually.