The Effect of Background Knowledge on Young Children's Comprehension of Explicit and Implicit Information

Abstract

To investigate the applicability of schema-theoretic notions to young children's comprehension of textually explicit and inferrable information, slightly above-average second grade readers with strong and weak schemata for knowledge about spiders read a passage about spiders and answered wh-questions tapping both explicitly stated information and knowledge that necessarily had to be inferred from the text. Main effects were found for strength of prior knowledge ( p < .01), and question type ( p < .01). Simple effects tests indicated a significant prior knowledge effect on the inferrable knowledge ( p < .025) but not on explicitly stated information. A follow-up study was conducted to verify the fact that the question type effect was not due to the chance allocation of inherently easier questions to one of the two question types. We found a reliable decrease in question difficulty attributable to cueing prepositional relations explicitly in the text ( p < .01). These data were interpreted as supporting and extending the arguments emerging from various “schema theories”.