Children's comprehension and memory for stories.

Sixteen 4-year-olds and sixteen 6-year-olds were shown four picture stories consisting of 15 to 18 pictures without text. The stories were well structured, consisting of two or more causally and temporally related episodes. The children were asked to describe each picture, and, after seeing all the pictures of a story, to recall the story without pictures. The pictures were either presented in their normal order or in scrambled order. The data analysis concentrated upon the comparison between the responses in the normal condition when the children were telling a story and in the scrambled condition, when they were merely responding to the pictures as such without the story context. The results showed that even the 4-year-olds, but especially the older children, were interpreting the pictures as stories in the normal condition and that their knowledge about stories, i.e., the story schema, determined the nature of their responses. Even in the scrambled condition the 6-year-olds tried to make sense of the pictures in terms of a story by making inferences, attributing thoughts and emotions to the characters, and using narrative conventions, while the 4-year-olds often reverted to a simple labeling strategy. In recall all of these trends were emphasized. Those parts of the descriptions that were best integrated into a story were recalled best, while nonintegrated descriptions tended to be forgotten.