The effects of storage and processing complexity on comprehension repair in children and adults

Reason Inferences in the Story Comprehension of Children and Adults

“…The recent research of Schmidt and Paris (1983), Schmidt et al (1984), and Ackerman (1986) suggests that young children are strongly dependent on contextual support in making inferences and show good ability to integrate and make use of contextual information. In contrast, other research suggests that children's relative lack of capacity or inclination to integrate different sources of story information (Ackerman, 1984a(Ackerman, , 1984bCase, Kurland, & Goldberg, 1982;Johnson & Smith, 1981;Markman, 1979) severely limits their sensitivity to contextual information. Experiments 1 and 2, respectively, were designed to examine children's dependence on contextual cues in making inferences and their ability to integrate multiple sources of contextual information.…”

“…The evidence suggests that 6-and 7-year-olds are able to generate acceptable inferences in some circumstances. However, young children usually seem less likely to generate inferences than older children and adults, depending on the information-processing complexity of the task (Ackerman, 1984a(Ackerman, , 1984bJohnson & Smith, 1981), the situational support for the inference (Ackerman, 1986;Schmidt & Paris, 1983;Schmidt, Schmidt, & Tomalis, 1984), the kind of inference that is invited (Thompson & Myers, 1985), and other contextual variables. However, neither inference generation nor modification are well understood.…”

Levels of Comprehension Monitoring and Working Memory in Good and Poor Comprehenders

“…This pattern of results indicates clearly that the lessskilled comprehenders did not have a general problem with the task (they only performed more poorly when the integration demands were high) and suggests that poor comprehenders will have particular problems with anomaly detection when the conflicting pieces of information are non-adjacent in the text. Several other authors have found that children's comprehension monitoring is affected by the distance in the text between the inconsistent items of information and/or by the complexity of the inference required (Ackerman, 1984a, b;Zabrucky & Ratner, 1986), but have not explored the differential effects of distance on good and poor comprehenders.…”

“…those who have reading comprehension difficulties in the absence of word reading difficulties. One experiment (Yuill, Oakhill, & Parkin, 1989) that is particularly relevant to the present study used an anomaly resolution task derived from Ackerman (1984a). This task is slightly different from those used to explore comprehension monitoring, since it tests ability to repair problems in a text (by integrating information), rather than the ability to detect them in the first place.…”

Children's Sensitivity to Comprehension Failure in Interpreting a Nonliteral Use of an Utterance

“…Because most outcome measures are insensitive to these distinctions, performances that are attributed to evaluative processes, and insensitivity that is attributed to comprehension failure, may in fact reflect regulative processes and acute sensitivity to comprehension failure. Indirect evidence that developmental monitoring differences often may concern regulative processes comes from findings that 6-and 7-year-olds show excellent detection of propositional inconsistency (i.e., evaluation) in many discourse situations (see Ackerman, 1982Ackerman, , 1983Ackerman, , 1984aBaker, 1984;Tunmer, Nesdale, & Pratt, 1983). Thus the extent of children's insensitivity to their own comprehension failure is unclear.…”