BUILDING A STORY REPRESENTATION - THE EFFECTS OF EARLY CONCEPT PROMINENCE ON LATER CAUSAL INFERENCES BY CHILDREN

The 4 experiments determined how processes involved in establishing the prominence of a concept early in a story influence the later use of the concept by children in making causal inferences. In Experiments 1 and 2, children and adults listened to stories containing an early goal sentence and a later inconsistent outcome; then they answered a question about the reason for the inconsistency. The early prominence of a focal object was varied by manipulating story titles and the number of context sentences that preceded the goal sentence. Later object inferences varied with context sentence and title for all grades, and the dependence on the early information seemed to decrease with grade. Experiment 3 established that the effects involved maintaining concept accessibility. Experiment 4 showed that early prominence is critical. The results overall point out the importance of early structure building processes in representing story information.