Story Recall in Kindergarten Children: Effect of Method of Presentation on Psycholinguists Performance

BLANK, MARION, and FRANK, SHELDON M. Story Recall in Kindergarten Children: Effect of Method of Presentation on Psycholinguistic Performance. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1971, 42, 299-319. A story-retelling task was devised as a means of testing syntactic and semantic aspects of language performance in kindergarten children. Syntactic recall was reduced in amount and varied in pattern from the commonly used single sentence imitation task. Several factors appeared to be responsible, including such variables as semantic content and stress (the need to retain large amounts of of information). Linguistic performance, including both semantic and syntactic recall, was enhanced by varying the method of presentation so that S was required to play a more active role in the situation. In addition to the method of presentation, intelligence was found to influence performance in that children with higher MAs showed significantly better recall.