An exploratory study of story structure and age effects on children's ability to sequence stories∗

To investigate the strategies children use in comprehending written stories, third, sixth, and ninth graders were given scrambled six‐sentence stories and asked to reorder them. Three versions of each of six stories were created. All were well‐formed stories, but the first version was the canonical form of the story predicted by story grammar rules; the second version began with a sentence questioning the conclusions of the canonical form, while in the third this conclusion began the story. Significant effects of grade and structure indicate that the canonical form is more easily ordered than are the other structures and also that third graders are much less accurate at the task than are sixth or ninth graders. Additionally, children were shown to use an event‐sequence strategy and to attend to various surface text features. However, the results suggest that the deep structure (story grammar structure) is of much greater importance in comprehension than are features of surface structure. Notes The research reported herein was supported in part by the National Institute of Education under Contract No. US‐NIE‐C‐400–76–0116. The authors would like to thank the publishers at Barnell Loft for their permission to adapt passages from Detecting the Sequence.