Children's Memory for Inferential Relationships in Prose

PARIS, SCOTT G., and UPTON, LAURENCE R. Children's Memory for Inferential Relationships in Prose. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1976, 47, 660-668. Children's comprehension and memory for different kinds of information in prose was assessed in 2 experiments. In the first experiment, elementary school children listened to paragraphs and subsequently answered questions about explicit and implicit semantic relationships contained within the stories. Performance improved with age on all categories of questions but most dramatically on those concerning some inferential relationships. Comprehension of implied relationships improved among subjects between 6 and 10 years of age and may not reflect a simple growth in memory capacity. In experiment 2 the relationship between children's initial comprehension of story information and later free recall was investigated. The ability to understand inferred presuppositions and consequences within stories was found to be highly correlated with recall. In fact, the correlation increased significantly with age. Some strategies of inferential comprehension that may account for the developmental changes are discussed.