Semantic integration in children's reconstruction of narrative sequences

Abstract

Preschool to fourth grade subjects were required to reconstruct a previously seen logical sequence by selecting old items from a set containing actually seen events and two types of new items, those consistent or inconsistent with the ordered sequence of the story. Older children were more efficient at adopting a consistent choice strategy, at rejecting inconsistent items and at retaining the end-anchor items of the story. When performance on the old anchor items was excluded, however, all grades had difficulty distinguishing the new-consistent items from the actually experienced old items. It is suggested that memory for logical narrative sequences involves the retention of the gist or theme in an integrated unified representation of the meaning rather than a series of discrete events. Further, the underlying processes of integration and inference are stable across ages.