Children's Use of Successive dues to Generate and Monitor Inferences

ScaMnrr, CONSTANCE R., and PARIS, Scorr G. Children's Use of Successive Clues to Generate and Monitor Inferences. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1983, 54, 742-759. The purpose of these studies was to examine how children use clues in narrative stories to derive inferences. The number of clues and manner of presentation were varied to determine how children reason with converging evidence for each inference. In 3 studies, children between 5 and 10 years of age listened to short stories and answered questions about presented and implied information. Experiment 1 revealed that performance on inference questions improved with age and with the number of clues provided. In Experiment 2 children generated plausible inferences from the beginnings of stories both verbally and nonverbally. They were required to monitor the likelihood of those possibilities as new information was presented. Older children generated a greater variety of inferences and monitored those inferences more effectively than younger children. In Experiment 3 the clues were blocked together or interspersed with irrelevant information during presentation. Older children apparently integrated clue information to derive inferences, but young children tended to treat clues as isolated sources of information. The studies reveal how hypothesis generation, comprehension monitoring, clue integration, and converging evidence influence children's developing inferential reasoning.