Memory for embedded and sequential story structures

Goldman, Susan R.; Varnhagen, Connie K.

doi:10.1016/0749-596x(86)90034-3

Cited by 87 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Participants read two short texts: a child-friendly narrative text about a mole who wanted to buy a shovel (based on stories used by Varnhagen, 1986 andby van den Broek, 1988) and an expository text about the characteristics of a mole. This study focuses on the narrative text (see Figure 1 for the complete story).…”

Section: Measurement Instrumentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Pavias

Broek

Hickendorff

et al. 2016

Discourse Processes

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This study examined the contributions of developmental changes in social-cognitive ability throughout adolescence to the development of narrative comprehension. We measured the effects of sensitivity to the causal structure of narratives and of sensitivity to differences in social-cognitive processing demands on narrative recall by children (8-10 years old), adolescents (13 -15 years old), and adults (19-21 years old). Generalized mixed-effects models for dichotomous variables revealed that social-cognitive processing demands of story elements predicted differences in narrative recall between the age groups, over and above the causal importance of story elements. Children's and adolescents' recall of the narrative differed from that of adults, and these differences were most apparent for social-cognitive aspects of the narrative. These findings suggest that immature social-cognitive abilities limit narrative comprehension in childhood and adolescence and, in doing so, contribute to our understanding of the interaction between reader characteristics and text characteristics in the development of narrative comprehension. 488q Marcella Pavias, Paul van den Broek, Marian

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Section: Measurement Instrumentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Pavias

Broek

Hickendorff

et al. 2016

Discourse Processes

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“…Because it is a major component of comprehension, goal information is kept in a relatively high state of availability (Lutz & Radvansky, 1997;Radvansky & Curiel, 1998;. When comprehenders are managing multiple, related goals, the most immediate, unachieved goal is most available (Goldman & Varnhagen, 1986;Lutz & Radvansky, 1997;.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…To appreciate a story plot, readers must understand how the characters' actions f it their goals Magliano, Zwaan, & Graesser, 1998;Trabasso et al, 1989). There is substantial evidence that such goals are highly accessible during comprehension (Albrecht & Myers, 1995;Goldman & Varnhagen, 1986;Lutz & Radvansky, 1997;Radvansky & Curiel, 1998;Singer & Halldorson, 1996;van den Broek & Lorch, 1993).…”

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confidence: 99%

Goal coordination in narrative comprehension

Magliano

Radvansky

2001

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

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In this paper, we report two experiments in which the consequence of maintaining multiple, unrelated character goals during comprehension were studied. This is in contrast to previous work that has focused on a single goal, or multiple related goals. The results showed that the presence of active subsequent goals can diminish the availability of earlier mentioned goals, even in the absence of semantic and other relations. In contrast, the status of earlier mentioned goals does not influence the availability of subsequent goals. These results support an explanation-based view of comprehension.

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“…Five types of evidence have been gathered. First, statements that have more causal connections to other statements in a narrative are more often recalled than statements with few connections (Goldman & Varnhagen, 1986;Graesser, 1981;Graesser & Clark, 1985;Trabasso, Sec co, & van den Broek, 1984;Trabasso & van den Broek, 1985;van den Broek, 1988;van den Broek, Rohleder, & Narvaez, 1996). Second, statements with more causal connections are accessed in memory more quickly than statements with fewer connections (O'Brien & Myers, 1987).…”

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confidence: 99%

The role of causal discourse structure in narrative writing

et al. 2000

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All writers produce text content and ideally connect it together according to discourse conventions. Weinvestigate whether a particularly strong discourse convention, the need for causal coherence in narratives, can predict the kind of text writers will produce. Causality has been found to be a significant discourse factor in reading comprehension and hence can be expected to determine also what writers produce during composition. In Experiment 1, writers composed short continuations at various points throughout a simple narrative, whereas in Experiment 2, writers composed continuations to complete several narratives. The results indicate that causality indeed plays a major role in composition. Writers tend to produce new text in such a way that it is causally connected to the prior text. Furthermore, writers favored causal relations of necessity or of necessity and sufficiency while largely avoiding relations of sufficiency alone, which suggests a general discourse constraint to be maximally informative (e.g., Grice, 1975).All writers must produce ideas (Collins & Gentner, 1980;Torrance, Thomas, & Robinson, 1996) and ideally, writers also provide coherence by connecting those ideas in some genre-appropriate way (McCutchen & Perfetti, 1982). Scardama1ia (1985, 1987) captured these observations by describing two sets of knowledge on which writers draw during writing: (1) Writers use topic knowledge (including the evolving text) to produce relevant ideas, and (2) writers use discourse knowledge to structure how the ideas are arranged and to determine which topic ideas are relevant (McCutchen, 1986; MeCutchen & Perfetti, 1982).Topic and discourse knowledge play important, but different, roles in determining which ideas are produced and how they are ultimately connected. For example, if a writer knows more about baseball and less about soccer (varying topic knowledge), the writer has different limits in what he/she is able to say when composing a description of each game. Regardless of topic knowledge, however, the writer's discourse knowledge should cue him/her to attempt to say something in each of several categories for the genre of "game description," such as mentioning "the object of the game," "the rules," "the number of players," and so on (e.g., Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1982 1986). Coe (1987) has referred to conventions for the form of the discourse as heuristics that help writers search for particular kinds of information to produce for text. A very explicit example ofdiscourse conventions exists in the Publication Manual ofthe American Psychological Association (1994), which helps writers by specifying what kinds of ideas are considered relevant for a research report and how they are to be arranged. Thus, available topic information limits specific content, whereas discourse knowledge influences what kinds of topic information are produced and how they are connected. If this view is correct, it should be possible, given a genre with well-known discourse conventions, to make predictions about the kinds of ...

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Memory for embedded and sequential story structures

Cited by 87 publications

References 10 publications

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

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

Goal coordination in narrative comprehension

The role of causal discourse structure in narrative writing

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