Peer’s mental states in a collaborative setting: Developmental perspective on children’s inferential abilities

The present study investigates the development of children’s ability to make inferences about a peer’s mental state. In this study 48 eight-year-old children, 49 ten-year-old children and 44 adults observed and analyzed short video sequences, extracts from a socio-cognitive interaction between two children working on a mathematical task. The participants inferred mental states of one of the videotaped children while answering questions. Half of the participants watched the different sequences with sound and the other half watched them without sound. The results show that ten-year-old children are nearly as skilled as adults in making inferences but that eight-years-old children make less relevant inferences. The access to verbal information influenced the inferences only for the eight-year-old group.     

The Efficacy of Multimedia Stories in Preschoolers’ Explicit and Implicit Story Comprehension

Oral language provides a foundation for reading comprehension. Story comprehension is a fundamental oral language skill; it covers making inferences, identifying main ideas, monitoring, perspective-taking, and applying working memory capacity. Complex reasoning and perspective-taking are key factors in deep reading comprehension. Preliterate children’s deeper story comprehension skills can be initial indicators of their later reading comprehension. Thus, the purpose of this research is to investigate preliterate preschool children’s story comprehension skills in detail. This study focuses on the additional multimedia features of digital storybooks and whether they hinder or promote young children’s explicit and implicit comprehension in a small group reading activity. The findings revealed that (a) children in the multimedia-enhanced storybook group outperformed the print storybook group in terms of both explicit and implicit story comprehension, (b) explicit story comprehension was higher than implicit story comprehension for both groups, and (c) the children recalled significantly more story elements and the length of the story retellings was greater with the aid of animated illustrations. The findings indicate that a digital storybook provides close temporal contiguity of text and visuals and may enhance story understanding by concretizing the narration. The study provides evidence that multimedia stories can foster children’s implicit story comprehension and inferential thinking about the content of the story.     

AGE DIFFERENCES IN EFFICIENCY OF READING COMPREHENSION FROM PRINTED VERSUS COMPUTER‐DISPLAYED TEXT

Computer technology has become a tremendous aid in examining the aging process as it relates to reading by allowing researchers to measure and control processing time. But is the computer a passive player in the study of reading and aging? Are we overlooking interactions between computers and participants using them? This study compared two types of computer presentation (investigator‐paced and self‐paced by the reader) to reading from the printed page. Older adults were most efficient in their reading comprehension when reading from the printed page, while young adults were most efficient from computer‐paced text. Although reading is a highly practiced skill for both young and old adults, the computer method of presentation is much less familiar to old adults. An overestimation of age differences with misleading findings may occur if computers are routinely used to study age differences in reading comprehension.     

Hyphens for disambiguating phrases: effectiveness for young and older adults

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether hyphens that disambiguate phrasing in ambiguous sentences influence reading rate and reading comprehension for younger and older adults. Moreover, as working memory (WM) has been implicated in age-related changes in sentence comprehension for both auditory and written materials, we asked if it contributed to comprehension of our sentences with hyphenated and non-hyphenated ambiguous noun phrases (NPs), predicting that the hyphens would reduce WM load. Twenty younger (M?=?24?years) and 20 older (M?=?73?years) adults read sentences with either ambiguous or non-ambiguous NPs that were either hyphenated or not. Both reading times for the sentences and accuracy on Yes/No questions were measured. Results indicated that younger adults read sentences more rapidly than the older participants whether sentences were presented word-by-word or as complete sentences. Both younger and older adults read sentences with ambiguous hyphenated NPs faster than sentences with ambiguous non-hyphenated NPs. Yes/No question accuracy distinguished reading of the sentences with ambiguous hyphenated phrases from those with ambiguous non-hyphenated phrases for older, but not for younger adults. Regression analyses showed that age contributed to both accuracy and reading times on this task, whereas WM did not.     

The impact of childhood reading on the development of environmental values

Direct experiences of nature are becoming less common in our urbanised world and little research exists regarding the impact of less direct experiences, particularly how childhood reading relates to the development of pro-environmental values. This study differs from previous reports into the influence of books, as it concentrates on the potential influence of fiction rather than factual or scientific texts. This qualitative study involved semi-structured interviews with 31 educators at Eastern Australian Environmental Education Centres to understand the relationship of childhood reading and value development. Findings reveal that participants: (a) recall predominantly fictional reading material; (b) recall stories by Tolkien, Blyton and Rowling as pro-environmental influences; and (c) commonly exhibit the counter-intuitive influence of fantasy/SF stories in their formative years. Stories will never replace authentic childhood experiences in the natural environment; however, judicious use of appropriate stories could be a valuable teaching strategy as readers often unquestioningly accept information from stories.     

沉默的反叛者——探析凯特·肖邦的《一小时的故事》

《一小时的故事》是美国女作家凯特·肖邦的短篇小说代表作,同时也被学界视为女性主义文学的名篇之一。本文通过分析女主人公马兰德夫人一个小时之内的情感变化及其女权意识觉醒的过程,反映了作为一个沉默的反叛者追求自由之路的坎坷和艰辛,旨在揭露19世纪末美国男权社会对于女性的压迫与束缚。     

Understanding Social Display Rules: Using One Person’s Emotional Expressions to Infer the Desires of Another

In social contexts, people’s emotional expressions may disguise their true feelings but still be revealing about the probable desires of their intended audience. This study investigates whether children can use emotional expressions in social contexts to recover the desires of the person observing, rather than displaying the emotion. Children (7.0–10.9 years, N = 211 across five experiments) saw a protagonist express one emotional expression in front of her social partner, and a different expression behind her partner’s back. Although the protagonist expressed contradictory emotions (and the partner expressed none), even 7-year-olds inferred both the protagonist’s and social partner’s desires. These results suggest that children can recover not only the desire of the person displaying emotion but also of the person observing it.     

Providing preschool foundations for later reading comprehension: The importance of and ideas for targeting inferencing in storybook‐sharing interventions

A significant gap in emerging literacy intervention with preschoolers relates to a skill that is crucial to later reading comprehension–the ability to engage in inferencing. This article presents a theoretical rationale for fostering inferential language during book sharing with preschool children, and provides research‐based ideas for how this can be best accomplished. It is suggested that, at the preschool level, children can be supported in their ability to make inferences about stories read aloud to them by having adults ask both literal and inferential questions that, first and foremost, relate to the causal structure of stories. Additionally, questions focused on informational and evaluative inferences serve to further enhance story comprehension. A rubric for connecting such questions to the elements of story grammar is offered, and a specific example from a published preschool level storybook is provided. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Inference generation, story comprehension, and language skills in the preschool years

Several researchers have shown that children’s ability to make inferences is related to their reading comprehension. The majority of research on this topic has been conducted on older children. However, given the recent focus on the importance of narrative comprehension in prereaders, the current study examined the relationship between inference making and story comprehension in 4- to 5-year-olds. We examined children’s online inferences while narrating a wordless book as well as children’s story comprehension of a different storybook. We found that children’s total number of inferences was significantly related to their story comprehension. Three types of inferences were significantly related to story comprehension—characters goals, actions that achieved those goals, and character states. In a hierarchical regression controlling for children’s age and expressive vocabulary, a composite of these three inference types significantly predicted children’s story comprehension.     

Turning frogs into princes: can children make inferences from fairy tales?

Background This study investigates children’s ability to generate inferences from narratives containing counterfactual information. Methods 39 typically developing readers (mean age 10; 05) completed an on-line task in which they were asked to read short passages, followed by sentences which they had to judge as true or false. The sentences pertained to either a causal inference or a static inference that could have been made during the reading of the passage. The passages and corresponding sentences were either true in terms of real world knowledge, or were presented as fairy tales. Results Results indicated that overall children responded faster and more accurately to sentences related to causal inferences than to static inferences. Responses to both types of inferences were slower in the ‘fairy story’ condition. Conclusions Children’s pattern of inference generation appears to be the same irrespective of the factual basis of the passage. However, responses to sentences based on inferences in the preceding passage are slower in fairy stories.     

Effects of self-questioning on EFL students’ engagement in literary reading / Los efectos del autocuestionamiento en la lectura comprometida de textos literarios de estudiantes de inglés como lengua extranjera

This study examines the effects of self-questioning on EFL students’ literary reading engagement. Two interventions were tested: (1) students generating questions while reading short stories, and then exploring their questions in small-groups; and (2) students generating questions while reading, and then reflecting through a free writing activity. Participants were 59 Vietnamese undergraduate students enrolled in an English as a foreign language course. A pre-test post-test control group design with switching replications was used, with a control condition in which the teacher (instead of the students) posed the questions. Students’ reading engagement was measured by a written response to a short story and a questionnaire. Results showed that both self-questioning interventions positively influenced students’ reading engagement compared to the control condition. A maintenance of effects was also observed. We conclude that self-questioning combined with group discussions or free writing promotes students’ reading engagement.     

Collaborative partnerships to increase resilience among AIDS orphans: Some unforeseen challenges and caveats

Abstract

Previous research has attested to the power of metaphor-rich stories to enable resilience during individual therapy, but this has not been researched in a group context. We aimed to ascertain if the reading of brief stories in a group setting, with no other therapeutic intervention, would prove to be a valuable, inexpensive and accessible protective resource for the empowerment of AIDS orphans. We followed a quasi-experimental design, incorporating pre and post-test double control groups and a mixed methods approach to data collection. However, some very interesting methodological, ethical and practical challenges surfaced during implementation concerning: the meeting of community expectations; the identification of appropriate participant groups; the administration and suitability of research instruments; ensuring continued attendance of participants; and dealing with the emotional needs of participants without endangering the validity of the results. This article reports on these challenges and makes suggestions around issues that need to be resolved if future research partnerships with community members who care for AIDS orphans are to yield useful and valid research results.     

The Use of Trait Labels in Making Psychological Inferences

Three studies investigated children's capacity to use trait labels as tools for making inferences about mental states. For example, knowledge that a story character is "nice" as opposed to "mean" could lead to predictions that the character would respond with greater negative affect upon discovering that his or her action had made someone upset. Study 1 (N = 48) examined whether participants (kindergartners, second graders, fifth graders, and adults) would make different psychological inferences based on whether a character was labeled as "nice" versus "mean." Study 2 (N = 30) examined the same issue with 4-year-olds using a simpler methodology. Study 3 (N = 30) extended the results of Study 2, by examining whether describing characters as "shy" versus "not shy" would lead 4-year-olds to make different mental state inferences. Taken together, these findings suggest that even for young children, trait labels can serve as a basis for making nonobvious inferences. Developmental differences are discussed.     

Adults With Poor Reading Skills and the Inferences They Make During Reading

Millions of U.S. adults lack the literacy skills needed for most living-wage jobs. We investigated one particular comprehension process for these adults: generating predictive inferences. If a sentence says that someone falls from a 14th-story roof, a reader should infer almost certain death. On any test of comprehension, there are two dependent variables: the speed of the response to a test item and accuracy. To address both simultaneously, we used a decision model that separates how much information an individual understands from a text and the individual’s speed/accuracy trade-off settings. We found that adult literacy students do differentiate between predictive inference sentences and control sentences, a finding that illustrates how a decision-making model combined with tests of particular comprehension processes can lead to further understanding of low-literacy adults’ reading skills.     

拉尔夫·埃利森早期短篇小说的叙事特点

拉尔夫·埃利森早期短篇小说描写了美国黑人的经历,逐步展现了埃利森的艺术才能。本文从叙事学的角度(叙述视角和人物内心思想表达方式)探讨它们的叙事特点,揭示埃利森如何逐步完善小说的叙事策略,使之与小说探索黑人身份的主题紧密结合,同时揭示了埃利森早期短篇小说创作为《看不见的人》作了必要的准备。     

Remembering and understanding: the effects of changes in underlying knowledge on children's recollections

This study was designed to explore the influence of changes in children's knowledge on earlier constructed memories. Kindergartners' (N = 102) recall of a series of stories was examined as a function of their interpersonal knowledge about the main story character. Children's knowledge about the protagonist was manipulated prior to presentation of the stories, and the effects of their impressions on story recall were examined. A change in some of the children's impressions was then promoted, and the impact of this second knowledge manipulation on recall of previously heard stories was assessed. The results indicated that children's story recall was affected by their prior impressions. Moreover, following the second knowledge manipulation, children revised their story reports in ways that were consistent with their newly acquired impressions, which suggests that they had reconstructed their memories of previously heard stories. These findings provide evidence for both prospective and retrospective effects of knowledge on memory.     

悲剧人生中的自我救赎——《重访巴比伦》主题浅析

＂爵士乐时代＂的命名者司各特·菲茨杰拉德以其自身的经历和感悟留下了许多惊世之作,《重返巴比伦》即为其中非常重要的短篇小说之一,描述了以其独特的视角对战后美国社会的荒唐与无奈作出了生动的刻画,延续了菲茨杰拉德一贯的悲观灰色的基调,并以主人公的所思所为作出了对无奈现实的反抗;作品人物面对无情现实所作出的自省谴责与努力补救,正是作家本人对自我及社会大众的救赎,借助小说的力量向大众布道,给精神空虚的人们加以指引,从而使得这篇小说成为具有历史时代意义的佳作。     

Dyslexia and the life course

The life stories of adults diagnosed with dyslexia as children were examined, with emphasis on the related emotional experiences. The life story method of narrative analysis was used to compare and analyze the accounts of 12 participants who were interviewed extensively. The findings indicated that self-esteem problems may emerge by early childhood as individuals contend with aspects of their learning disabilities that interfere with typical development. By school age, all participants noted self-esteem problems when they experienced struggles or failures in school, which could feel traumatic. Testing and diagnosis improved self-esteem when conducted in a relevant manner that led to adaptation. The central plots of the participants' lives were characterized by the interplay between the functional challenges of their learning disabilities and the related self-esteem issues. Compensation involved the individual's areas of competence and the resources within the environment. Niches in late adolescence and young adulthood held potential to dramatically improve compensation. Participants generally exhibited four ways of life in adulthood and an added sense of emotional insecurity. Each attempted to integrate lifelong emotional experiences related to living with diagnosed dyslexia.     

LIST FORMATS IMPROVE MEDICATION INSTRUCTIONS FOR OLDER ADULTS

We conducted a survey to compare a group of older adults’ and a group of younger adults’ beliefs regarding their own and each other's memory abilities. We also asked both age groups to identify items they believed older adults remember well. The survey was returned by 185 older (ages 60‐92) and 184 younger (ages 17‐39) participants. Of the 30 items we generated older adults reported that they would remember 23 better than younger adults would and 7 worse than younger adults would, and younger adults reported that they would remember 12 of the items better and 18 of them worse than older adults. Both age groups also generated many items that they believed older adults remember better than younger adults do. Finally, respondents generated items that they believed adults in their own age group had to remember routinely that adults in the other age group did not. The two groups agreed that older adults would spend more time and have more difficulty learning lines for presentation to an audience than would younger adults. Most of the older adults reported that their memories had changed; most of the younger adults reported that their memories had not changed. The belief that although older adults’ memory is worse than young adults’ they still remember some things better than the young is viewed as a realistic assessment, and implications for future research are discussed.