The Inferential Operations of Preschool and Primary Education Children during Narrative Texts Comprehension.

A study examined the effects of age upon the amount and kind of explicit information in oral summary tasks of preschool and third-grade children. Findings show an important developmental change in the use and in the type of inferential operations. Preschool children used fewer connectors and were not as able to preserve the original order of propositions in the text compared to third graders. On the contrary, third-grade children showed the tendency to include most of the explicit information and they generated more textual inferred information, they were able to find the textual cues necessary for the retrieval of the elaborative information from long-term memory. Results also indicated that both groups may infer causal links between events and actions of a story in response to general task demands, and that they were able to know that these relations were important for understanding the story. Both groups activated automatic processes more easily than controlled processes. However, both groups had problems searching for bridging knowledge and making logical inferences. (Contains 2 tables of data and 12 references.) (Author/RS)