Conceptual Change in Narrative Knowledge: Psychological Understandings of Low-Literacy and Literate Adults

Abstract

Abstract We examined low-literacy and literate adults' conceptual knowledge in two domains: narrative (composition and recall) and social cognition. Results indi-cated that the performance of the two groups was qualitatively different and that subjects in each group used a similar knowledge structure on both types of tasks. Specifically, the low-literacy group largely accounted for action se-quences by referring to the characters' context-specific intentions or to the subjects' own personal experience. In contrast, the literate subjects utilized a decontextualized mode of reasoning, wherein they interpreted the characters' intentions. We argue that the move toward this decontextualized reasoning is profitably viewed by considering it in terms of conceptual knowledge struc-tures, each consisting of a set of semantic and syntactic elements and having a wide yet delimited range of application.(Psychology)