The Role of Inference Generation in Discourse Comprehension and Retelling
Donato Lauria, Vito Lozito, Claudia Giorgio, Marialuisa Guglielmi, Rosangela Notarnicola, Irene Nuzzi, Maria Porfido, Antonella Silletti, Marzia Toto, Andrea Marini
The current investigation aims to explore whether discourse comprehension is enhanced by the ability to identify those clues that in reading and/or listening to a story signal the need to make an inference (Cain & Oakhill, 1999). Two groups of 6-year-old children with typical development were asked to understand and repeat a modified version of the Frog Story. The control group simply listened to the story read aloud by an examiner while looking at the vignettes depicting the story scenes. While listening to the story, children in the experimental group were asked to answer a series of questions aimed at focusing on inferences that should be drawn to adequately understand the gist of the story. Statistical analyses showed that the two groups of children produced the same amount of Information Units and Episodes in their story-retellings. These results do not support the hypothesis by Cain and Oakhill (1999) and are discussed in light of current hypotheses of discourse comprehension.
Keywords
Listening comprehension, Frog Story_mod., Inference, Information Unit, Episodes.