CONSTRAINTS ON THE CAUSAL INFERENCES OF CHILDREN AND ADULTS IN COMPREHENDING STORIES

What constrains a causal inference about an unexpected event in a story? The experiments examined factors at encoding and retrieval that provide constrain. Second and fifth graders and college students listened to stories containing an early goal sentence and a later inconsistent outcome. Encoding factors included the presence or absence of clues about the role of an object concept in the outcome, the separation of clue and outcome, and whether the object concept was mentioned explicitly or only implied. Retrieval factors were manipulated simultaneously, and included whether one or two inferences were probed at test, whether an inference was probed first or second, and the qualitative overlap of clue and probe information. The results showed consistent encoding × retrieval interactions, with inferences reflecting weak encoding constraint varying with retrieval support. In addition, the effects generally decreased with grade. The results demonstrate the importance of encoding and retrieval interactions in interpreting developmental differences in story inferences, and support a specific retrieval model. © 1991.