Young Children's Detection of Violations in Familiar Stories and Emerging Comprehension Monitoring

This study examined young children's ability to detect violations to script-like story text to investigate the role of detection in the development of comprehension monitoring. An online expectancy violation detection task was used during the reading of familiar stories, and nonverbal as well as verbal responses were measured. Results revealed that children 30 to 47 months of age detected violations to familiar text. However, the youngest children are not as skilled as older children in doing so. Developmentally, solely nonverbal detection responses were the first to emerge for story violations. Around 36 months of age, children not only increased the frequency of their accurate detections of violations but also incorporated their nonverbal expressions of detection into a matrix of a more thorough comprehension monitoring response.