Intrusion of a Thematic Idea in Children's Comprehension and Retention of Stories

2 experiments concerned with memory and comprehension of prose passages were conducted with children from second through seventh grade. In both experiments the major variable was the provision of appropriate frameworks for comprehending ambiguous sections of the passages. In the initial experiment, recognition of themecongruent and incongruent foils was the main metric, while in the second experiment intrusions in recall and postrecall interviews were used to measure the influence of preexisting expectations on story comprehension and recall. The main effect was the striking absence of developmental trends; children behaved like adults in both the recall and recognition studies. Recall of ambiguous passages was enhanced if a relevant framework was given intrusions reflected the prior orientation, and the subjects had difficulty distinguishing between their own embellishments and the actual story content. Under recognition conditions, children treated themecongruent foils as if they were target items and incongruent foils as if they were distractors. It is argued that for children as well as adults schemata provide the interpretive framework for comprehending discourse.