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Understanding of causal expressions in skilled and less skilled text comprehenders
Author(s) -
Oakhill Jane,
Yuill Nicola,
Donaldson Morag L.
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
british journal of developmental psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.062
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 2044-835X
pISSN - 0261-510X
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-835x.1990.tb00854.x
Subject(s) - psychology , comprehension , task (project management) , reading comprehension , sentence , sentence completion tests , cognitive psychology , empirical research , reading (process) , developmental psychology , linguistics , natural language processing , computer science , philosophy , management , epistemology , economics
This experiment investigated the. relation between 7‐ to 8‐year‐old children's reading comprehension and their understanding of causal expressions. A group of skilled comprehenders was compared to a less skilled group on two oral tasks involving because sentences: a questions task and a sentence completion task. For each task, the subjects received deductive items (where because introduces the evidence for a conclusion) and empirical items (where because introduces a cause). The experiment also investigated the effect of modifying the instructions for the deductive items so as to focus the subjects' attention on the source of evidence for a conclusion. Skilled comprehenders performed significantly better than less skilled comprehenders on the deductive, but not on the empirical, items. Performance on deductive items was poorer than that on empirical items. However, scores on the deductive items were increased by the modified instructions.