title: Adults' and children's monitoring of story events in the service of comprehension.
abstract: When reading narratives, adults monitor shifts in time, space, characters, goals, and causation. Shifts in any of these dimensions affect both moment-by-moment reading and memory organization. The extant developmental literature suggests that middle school children have relatively sophisticated understandings of each of these dimensions but does not indicate whether they spontaneously monitor these dimensions during reading experiences. In four experiments, we examined the processing of event shifts by adults and children, using both an explicit verb-clustering task and a reading time task. The results indicate that middle school children's and adults' post-reading memory is organized using these dimensions but that children do not monitor dimensions during moment-by-moment reading in the same manner as adults. These differences were not a function of differentially difficult texts for children and adults, or between-group differences. The findings have implications for models of adult and child text processing and for understanding children's developing narrative comprehension.
authors.affiliation: Department of Counseling, Educational, and School Psychology, Wichita State University, 1845 Fairmount, Wichita, KS 67260, USA. ate.bohn@wichita.edu
authors.forename: Catherine M
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Bohn-Gettler
authors.forename: David N
authors.initials: DN
authors.lastname: Rapp
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: van den Broek
authors.forename: Panayiota
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Kendeou
authors.forename: Mary Jane
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: White
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology*; D011581:Psychological Tests; D011932:Reading