Children's and Adults’ Ability to Build Online Emotional Inferences During Comprehension of Audiovisual and Auditory Texts

Contributions of emotion understanding to narrative comprehension in children and adults

“…Children and adults rated the protagonists' emotional states as more negative and more aroused than their own emotional states. These findings extend those of Diergarten and Nieding (2015) and suggest that, like adults, 11-year-old children are able to infer emotional states during reading. Although a direct comparison of age groups is not possible because children and adults read different narratives, the patterns suggest that especially on the valence dimension children's ratings of their own emotional states and those of the protagonists differ more than those for adults.…”

“…Learning to read is one of the key achievements that children have to attain, and usually their first introduction to reading is through narratives. Understanding emotions in narratives requires the development of sufficient social-cognitive abilities such as perspective taking and Theory of Mind (Diergarten & Nieding, 2015). People seem innately motivated to understand the mental worlds of others, and many studies have examined the development of the ability to do so.…”

“…However, the accuracy of emotional inferences continues to develop as children mature (e.g., Vendeville, Brechet, & Blanc, 2015). For example, Diergarten and Nieding (2015) examined the ability of both children (aged 5, 8, and 10) and adults to infer protagonists' emotional states using movie clips and audiobooks. They found that irrespective of modality, 5-year-old children were already able to infer the valence dimension of protagonists' emotional states.…”

Effects of Social-Cognitive Processing Demands and Structural Importance on Narrative Recall: Differences Between Children, Adolescents, and Adults

“…A crucial factor in such differences between children and adults likely is that the social-cognitive abilities that are needed to make these inferences are immature in children. A recent study showed that 5-, 8-, and 10-year-old children are able to infer the emotional state of story characters, albeit from short movies and audiobooks, but that their inferences become more precise with development (Diergarten & Nieding, 2015). These findings suggest that inferring emotional states is important for narrative comprehension and point to the important role of the interaction between reader characteristics and text characteristics.…”

Contributions of Causality Processing Models to the Study of Discourse Comprehension and the Facilitation of Student Learning

“…The tools of the model have been applied to the study of the development of comprehension. Results from these studies suggest that older children are able to generate inferences that connect larger parts of the text (such as paragraphs, episodes, etc), and to infer abstract connections (such as between topics, and between story events and the emotions of the characters) to a greater extent than younger children (Diergarten & Nieding, 2015;Kendeou et al, 2009;Mouw, van Leijenhorst, Saab, Danel, & van den Broek, 2017;Rapp, van den Broek, McMAster, Kendeou, & Espin, 2007;van den Broek, 1997; van den Broek, White, Kendeou, & Carlson, 2009) 2 . For example, 7-year-old children generate a higher number of inferences than 4-year-old children (Thompson & Myers, 1985).…”