Children's Enactment of Characters' Movements: A Novel Measure of Spatial Situation Model Representations and Indicator of Comprehension

A story's space or setting often determines and constrains the actions of its characters. We report on an experiment with 106 children of 7–8 years old in which, using a novel enactment task, we measured children's representation of a story character's movement during story listening. We found that children were more likely to enact movements that were explicitly stated in the passage than those they had to infer based on their situation model representation of the house and the character's location within it. We found that this ability to infer movements was significantly predictive of children's narrative comprehension after controlling for oral comprehension, vocabulary, working memory, and enactment of explicitly stated movements. We discuss the role of spatial situation models in comprehension and potential future uses for this enactment task in research and classrooms.