Abstract
According to the tripartite model of text representation (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983), readers form representations of the text surface and textbase, and construct a situation model. In this study, an experiment was conducted to investigate whether these levels of representation would be affected by adding illustrations to narrative text and whether the order of text and illustrations would make a difference. Students aged between 7 and 13 years (N = 146) read 12 narrative texts, 4 of them with illustrations presented before their corresponding sentences, 4 with illustrations presented after, and 4 without any illustration. A sentence recognition task was used to assess the accuracy for text surface, textbase, and situation model. For the text surface and situation model, neither the presence of illustrations nor the order of text and illustrations influenced accuracy. However, the textbase was negatively affected by illustrations when they followed their corresponding sentences. We suggest that illustrations can initiate model inspection after situation model construction (Schnotz, 2014), a process that can make substantial changes to the textbase representation.
Highlights
Generations of children have been exposed to illustrated storybooks, with tales read aloud by the children’s caregivers
Illustrations in storybooks appear to play a crucial role during the activity of reading aloud, and young children have been supposed as relying heavily on the information conveyed by the illustrations during story retelling (Isbell et al, 2004)
The purpose of our study was to examine the effect of illustrations on text surface, textbase, and situation model representations of written narrative text read by elementary and early secondary school children
Summary
Generations of children have been exposed to illustrated storybooks, with tales read aloud by the children’s caregivers. Books and novels for older, literate children often include illustrations, albeit to a lesser extent than storybooks for younger children. These illustrations have an ornamental function, but it is still worth investigating whether and how they may contribute to understanding narrative content during silent reading. The research goal of the present study is to specify how illustrations are related to both superficial and deeper comprehension levels of written narrative text. To this end, we refer to a theoretical account that provides three levels of text representation and to models of multimedia learning that use this theory to explain the comprehension of both unillustrated and illustrated narrative text
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