Structure and causal connections in children's on-line television narratives: What develops?

Abstract

This study investigated the role of event knowledge in children's (Grades 1, 3, 5, 7) inference of narrative structure and causal coherence in television narratives. Children narrated on-line stories for a script-based television program presented as a canonical or non-canonical version. For the canonical version, all children produced well-structured stories through the inclusion of basic narrative and episodic components. They also showed evidence of causally relating the scenes. In contrast, for the non-canonical version first and third graders focused primarily on basic narrative components and related the scenes by means of elementary temporal connections rather than causal. Only fifth and seventh graders inferred episodic components and causal connections in the non-canonical version. Results suggest that younger children's event knowledge allows them to infer narrative structure and causal connections in familiar script-based programs and that, with age, children become more flexible in using their event knowledge in inferring narrative structure and causal connections in less routine television narratives