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In an experiment with 114 children aged 9–12 years, we compared the ability to establish local and global coherence of narrative texts between auditory and audiovisual (auditory text and pictures) presentation. The participants listened to a series of short narrative texts, in each of which a protagonist pursued a goal. Following each text, we collected the response time to a query word that was either associated with a near or a distant causal antecedent of the final sentence. Analysis of these response times indicated that audiovisual presentation has advantages over auditory presentation for accessing information relevant for establishing both local and global coherence, but there are indications that this effect may be slightly more pronounced for global coherence.

We examined whether the comprehension of narrative texts differed between auditory, audiovisual, and written text presentations in a sample of 8- and 10-year-olds and adults. Based on multi-level theories of text comprehension that assume text comprehension to involve at least three levels of mental representation, we applied a sentence recognition task that enabled the separate assessment of the memory of the text surface, text base, and the situation model. Results indicate that 8-year-olds benefit from audiovisual and auditory text presentations in comparison with written text presentations in terms of their memory of situation model information. For 10-year-olds and adults, their text comprehension did not differ between audiovisual, auditory, and written text presentations. Additionally, the mode of text presentation had no effect on the memory of text surface and text base information.

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