The purpose of this study was to explore pre-readers' comprehension of a story with competing character goals. Fifty-eight children in three age groups (2½-3 years; 3-4 years; and 4-5 years) were read a story in which the protagonist's goal was unstated and conflicted with the goal of the secondary character. Understanding of explicit story…

Narratives have been extensively studied in recent decades, but studies investigating differences and similarities in the narrative features from a cross-cultural or cross-linguistic point of view are limited. This study investigated the narrative language of typically developing monolingual four- and eight-year-old Finnish, Italian and Canadian…

During a multifaceted classroom-based study, 22 7- and 8-year-old children had opportunities to develop their understanding of visual art and design elements and diverse narrative structures in picturebooks. The culminating activity of the case study research involved application and transformation of knowledge of the instructional foci as the…

The study examines the effects of a short period of explicit instruction on the narrative comprehension of French-speaking kindergarteners, as measured by story retell and comprehension questions. A group of kindergarteners that received explicit instruction (n = 15) was compared to a control group that was exposed to the same storybooks and…

The current study investigated the effect of colour vs. black-and-white pictures on the stories children told using the pictures as stimuli. Participants were 22 preschool children aged 4-6 (M = 59.98, SD = 7.52) attending day-care centres in a Western Canadian city. Two story sets of five pictures each, depicting stories with similar structure,…