This study examined the contributions of developmental changes in social-cognitive ability throughout adolescence to the development of narrative comprehension. We measured the effects of sensitivity to the causal structure of narratives and of sensitivity to differences in social-cognitive processing demands on narrative recall by children (8-10…

Because characters' goals play a key role in the structure of narratives, the ability to make inferences about goals is essential to narrative comprehension. Despite their importance, no previous studies have examined the process by which children make these goal inferences. In the current study, we examined 6- and 8-year-old children's goal…

In the present study, we investigated the degree to which children's inference generation ability generalises across different media and predicts narrative comprehension over and above basic language skills and vocabulary. To address both aims, we followed two cohorts of children aged 4 and 6 as they turned 6 and 8 years old, respectively. At each…

This study investigated the development of students' abilities to integrate information in stories as an aspect of reading comprehension. Students aged 8, 11, 14, and 18 judged the importance of key statements, which varied in their causal relations within an episode, between episodes, and in a higher-order structure, yielding three levels of…