Inference generation, story comprehension, and ... - Springer Link

Read Writ (2013) 26:403–429 DOI 10.1007/s11145-012-9374-7

Inference generation, story comprehension, and language skills in the preschool years Virginia Tompkins • Ying Guo • Laura M. Justice

Published online: 10 April 2012 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

Abstract Several researchers have shown that children’s ability to make inferences is related to their reading comprehension. The majority of research on this topic has been conducted on older children. However, given the recent focus on the importance of narrative comprehension in prereaders, the current study examined the relationship between inference making and story comprehension in 4- to 5-yearolds. We examined children’s online inferences while narrating a wordless book as well as children’s story comprehension of a different storybook. We found that children’s total number of inferences was significantly related to their story comprehension. Three types of inferences were significantly related to story comprehension—characters goals, actions that achieved those goals, and character states. In a hierarchical regression controlling for children’s age and expressive vocabulary, a composite of these three inference types significantly predicted children’s story comprehension. Keywords

Inference Comprehension Language Literacy Narrative

V. Tompkins (&) Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University at Lima, 4240 Campus Drive, Lima, OH 45804, USA e-mail: [email protected] Y. Guo School of Education, University of Cincinnati, 2600 Clifton Avenue, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA e-mail: [email protected] L. M. Justice School of Teaching and Learning, The Ohio State University, 1945 North High Street, Columbus, OH 43210, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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Introduction Reading comprehension is a fundamental prerequisite of children’s success in school, both in its own right and also as a means for accessing the entirety of the general education curriculum. Specifically, children who are not able to comprehend text will not only have difficulty accessing information presented within literary domains, but also in other important subjects as well, such as math and science (Yore, 2003). Of particular concern is that 33 % of American fourth graders and 25 % of eighth graders in 2009 were below basic levels on reading comprehension (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2010). Such statistics have led some to assert that there is a reading crisis in America’s schools and have stimulated considerable investment in understanding individual differences in reading comprehension, including precursors to skilled comprehension (see Adams, 2010). The purpose of this study was to examine young children’s inferences during literacy-related activities, as inferences are considered a critical determinant of comprehension ability (Perfetti, 1999). At the same time, difficulties with inferencing are often apparent in children who exhibit comprehension problems (e.g., Cain & Oakhill, 1999). Reading as a multi-component skill Researchers agree that reading is a complex process comprising several different component skills or processes. Some researchers view these skills as representing two broad categories—inside-out (e.g., code-related) skills and outside-in (e.g., oral language) skills; these two categories of skills may be interrelated, but it appears they develop independently and are the result of different experiences (Storch & Whitehurst, 2002; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998, 2001). During the last several decades, many reading researchers have focused primarily on the relevance of coderelated skills as prerequisites to reading, and have established the critical role that skills such as alphabet knowledge and phonological awareness play in reading development (e.g., National Early Literacy Panel, 2008; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002). However, researchers have increasingly acknowledged that oral language skills, such as comprehension, are also essential to the process of learning to read and that comprehension skills develop simultaneously with code-related skills in early childhood (Kendeou et al., 2005; Oakhill, Cain, & Bryant, 2003; Paris & Paris, 2003; Rapp, van den Broek, McMaster, Kendeou, & Espin, 2007; van den Broek et al., 2005a). Experts have argued that comprehension instruction should begin before children are able to read text (Hirsch, 2003); such instruction would focus primarily on building children’s language skills, as these are viewed as predominant precursors to skilled reading comprehension. Because reading comprehension is crucial for successful reading, researchers have examined the continuity of children’s comprehension of stories over time. In pre-readers comprehension is typically termed narrative comprehension as children are not yet reading on their own. There are several ways in which researchers have measured narrative comprehension in pre-readers, including children’s narrations of single pictures to entire books, children’s retellings of stories presented by adults,

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children’s responses to questions about stories either during a story or after the story has been told, or some combination of the above. Regardless of whether children are asked to produce narratives or to answer questions about narratives, researchers often measure the inferences children make or a combination of both literal and inferential information. Using these approaches, several researchers have found that narrative comprehension in early childhood (i.e., preschool to kindergarten) predicts reading comprehension in later grades (Griffin, Hemphill, Camp, & Wolf, 2004; Kendeou, Bohn-Gettler, White, & van den Broek, 2008; Kendeou, van den Broek, White, & Lynch, 2009; Paris & Paris, 2003; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002; van Kraayenoord & Paris, 1996). Thus, it is important to acknowledge that comprehension skills begin early and to precisely identify how these skills unfold. Importance of inference generation for narrative comprehension Reading comprehension involves several subskills, including vocabulary, world knowledge, story structure knowledge, working memory, comprehension strategies, literal interpretation of text, and the ability to make inferences (Caccamise & Snyder, 2005; Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2004; Kendeou et al., 2005). Inference generation was the focus of this study because to date we know relatively little about pre-readers’ inference generation, yet inference generation is central to comprehending a story whether it is presented orally, presented in pictures, or read in text (Kendeou et al., 2008). Inferences involve the listener/reader filling in information that was not directly presented in the story, connecting events in the story, and interpreting events in the story in relation to one’s world knowledge (Cain et al., 2004; Holmes, 1987; Kendeou et al., 2008). Researchers have found an association between children’s inference making and narrative comprehension in early childhood (e.g., Kendeou et al., 2008), as well as an association between inference making and reading comprehension in the elementary school years (e.g., Cain et al., 2004). Furthermore, Cain and Oakhill (1999) suggested that inference generation and reading comprehension are causally related, arguing that the ability to make inferences leads to better comprehension abilities. There are a variety of inferences that can be made during reading. Researchers have paid particular attention to goal and causal inferences because of their centrality to narrative comprehension. Goals are important because they provide the motivations for the actions that are carried out throughout a narrative (Lynch & van den Broek, 2007). Even 3- and 4-year-olds can identify goals in narratives when directly asked about them (e.g., Trabasso, Stein, Rodkin, Munger, & Baugh, 1992) and 5-year-olds are able to spontaneously produce characters’ goals in their recall of narratives (e.g., Trabasso & Nickels, 1992; Trabasso & Stein, 1997). However, even into the elementary school years, children tend to focus more on actions than on characters’ goals when recalling narratives (e.g., Trabasso et al., 1992, van den Broek, Lorch, & Thurlow, 1996). Related to goal inferences, causal inferences are also important to comprehending a narrative, such as connecting causes and consequences across events. Even 4-year-olds are aware of causal connections to a certain extent. For example, young children (4- to 6-year-olds) are more likely to remember narrative events when they have more causal connections (van den Broek

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et al., 1996), are able to correctly answer questions regarding causal relations in stories (Wenner, 2004), and include causal statements in their narratives (Stein, 1988; Trabasso & Nickels, 1992). The majority of research examining how inferences are spontaneously generated has been conducted with school aged children and adults (Lynch et al., 2008). Little research has examined the inferences that pre-readers make when exposed to a story (Kendeou et al., 2008). However, given the importance of understanding the foundations of reading skills and the importance of making inferences for reading comprehension, it follows that researchers should be devising ways of examining inference making abilities in young children. Presumably, little research has been done because of the difficulty in examining inference making in young children who are not yet decoding text. However, a few studies have examined the inferences that young children (6 years old or younger) make when listening to a story or watching one on television; these studies have shown that children as young as 4 years old can engage in making inferences. Kendeou et al. (2008) presented 4- and 6-year-olds with both an aurally presented story and a televised story. Children were then asked to recall these stories after listening to them. From children’s recalled narratives, Kendeou et al. (2008) coded children’s inferences, including goals, actions, and causal antecedents, causal consequences, character states, and character emotions. They assessed children’s narrative comprehension by assessing a composite of three skills: the number of events children recalled from the story, sensitivity to the causal structure of the story, and answers to comprehension questions about the story. These two cohorts of children were also seen 2 years later. They found that in both aural and televised contexts for both 4- and 6-year-olds at both time points, children’s inference generation was significantly related to their narrative comprehension (i.e., composite of three skills). Effect sizes ranged from .36 to .61 depending on the age group and context (aural or televised). They also examined whether children’s inferences predicted narrative comprehension after controlling for code-related skills (e.g., letter identification) and receptive vocabulary; they reported that children’s inferences uniquely predicted narrative comprehension, although which categories of inferences predicted narrative comprehension changed slightly depending on the age group and cohort. Goal inferences seemed particularly important as this was the only inference category that consistently predicted children’s narrative comprehension at age 4 and age 6 as well as at the 2 year follow up. Using the same procedures and methodology as Kendeou et al. (2008), Lynch et al. (2008) also examined 4- and 6-year-olds’ narrative comprehension— specifically children’s free recall of aural or televised stories as well as answers to comprehension questions. In this study, however, researchers were particularly interested in children’s sensitivity to the causal structure of narratives and so examined children’s free recall in terms of how well it mapped onto the causal network of the narrative, which was identified using the principles of causality (Trabasso, van den Broek, & Suh, 1989). They found that children’s sensitivity to the causal structure of narratives was significantly related to their overall story recall and the comprehension questions that were asked following their recall.

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Lynch and van den Broek (2007) adopted a slightly different approach to examining children’s inferences by assessing children’s on-line inferences about characters’ goals. In contrast to the methodology used by Kendeou et al. (2008) and Lynch et al. (2008) in which children recalled narratives after the completion of the story, on-line processes involve what a person thinks as they read a text. This type of methodology has been most widely used in studies with older children and adults in which they are asked to think aloud as they read a text (e.g., Laing & Kamhi, 2002; McGinnis, Goss, Tessmer, & Zelinski, 2008). Lynch and van den Broek (2007) examined 6- and 8-year-olds’ on-line inferences about goals specifically. An experimenter presented the story to each child aurally and stopped at six predetermined points to ask children to reflect on what was happening in the story. Additionally, after these stories were presented, children were asked to recall the story and asked nine comprehension questions. Lynch and van den Broek (2007) found that even after controlling for receptive vocabulary, children’s number of goal inferences significantly predicted their recall of the same narrative. They did not, however, examine the relationship between goal inferences and children’s comprehension as their main interest was comparing two goal conditions not on the relations among these different skills. Wenner (2004) examined 4-year-olds’ ability to make inferences about goals in their narrative retellings. Children were also asked four comprehension questions assessing both literal and inferential understanding of the story. The primary goal was to compare two conditions—one in which the goal of the story was accomplished late in the story and one in which the goal was accomplished early. Wenner (2004) found that in the goal-late narratives, 4-year-olds recalled the goal 45 % of the time, which was significantly better than the goal-early narratives. Additionally, children in the goal-late condition were more likely to mention the goal of the story in the comprehension questions. However, the relationship between children’s goal inferences and their answers to comprehension questions was not examined. Finally, a study by Paris and Paris (2003) suggests an association between young children’s spontaneous inferences and their narrative comprehension. They provided kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade children with a wordless book and elicited three measures of narrative comprehension. In the Storybook Picture Walk task, children were asked to look through the book and to say out loud what they were thinking. They examined five sets of behaviors during this task, including children’s book handling skills, engagement, picture comments, storytelling comments, and comprehension strategies. The last three categories included some behaviors that could be considered inferences (e.g., predicting what happens next), although inferences were not examined independently from non-inference comments. Second, in the Retelling task, children were asked to retell the story from the wordless book; children’s narratives were scored in terms of six narrative elements (e.g., setting, characters). However, Paris and Paris (2003) did not differentiate between literal information and inferences contained in children’s retellings. Third, in the Prompted Comprehension task, children were again presented with the same wordless book as an experimenter guided the page turning and asked 10 comprehension questions, including five literal and five inferential questions. These

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researchers found that children’s scores on each of the three narrative tasks were significantly correlated. Thus, although Paris and Paris (2003) did not directly examine children’s spontaneous production of inferences, the Picture Walk and Retelling tasks potentially included children’s production of such utterances, and both tasks were significantly related to children’s story comprehension, which included responses to both literal and inferential questions. Results of these studies of young children’s inference generation suggest that children as young as 4 years can make inferences in narrative contexts (Kendeou et al., 2008; Wenner, 2004) and that children as young as 6 years can make these inferences using on-line processing (Lynch and van den Broek, 2007). Additionally, children’s inferences, particularly inferences about goals and causal relations, are related to children’s narrative comprehension as young as 4 years of age (Kendeou et al., 2008). The latter finding suggests that children’s abilities to draw inferences may relate more generally to their language comprehension skills, as represented by narrative tasks. The current study This study aimed to further examine preschoolers’ ability to generate inferences in a narrative context, and to identify whether this ability is related to children’s story comprehension. Measuring inferences in pre-readers is difficult because we cannot rely on children to read the text themselves. Some researchers have provided children with a narrative and then examined the inferences they made when recalling that narrative (Kendeou et al., 2008; Lynch et al., 2008). Alternatively, Lynch and van den Broek (2007) adopted a more on-line approach by having 6- and 8-year-olds report what they were thinking at six points during an aurally presented narrative. Paris and Paris (2003) had children as young as kindergarteners create narratives on-line using a wordless book, although they did not specifically measure children’s inferences. In the current study, we aimed to take the inference assessment procedure one step further by having preschoolers (4- to 5-year-olds) provide a completely on-line narrative and to measure the inferences that they generated. We did this by presenting children with a wordless storybook and asking them to narrate the story. On the one hand, this task is more demanding than previous studies of young children’s inferences in that the child is not presented with a story prior to being asked to tell a story. On the other hand, this task may lessen the attentional resources of young children in which children hear a story and then are asked to tell it back to an examiner. Several researchers have found a relationship between working memory and reading comprehension (e.g., Cain et al. 2004; van den Broek, Rapp, & Kendeou, 2005b). An on-line approach to measuring children’s inferences may be less demanding than measuring children’s recall of an adult’s narrative in that the child’s narrative is supported by the pictures they are viewing as they tell the story and because children can go at their own pace rather than asking children to recall an entire story from memory. Another benefit of this type of task, which we will term story generation, is that it may also be more similar to the types of reading activities that children encounter in the classroom in which

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they must comprehend novel material with which they have had no previous experience. In the current study, we assessed children’s story comprehension independently of the narrative task for which inferences were measured. We chose to use separate narrative tasks to examine preschoolers’ inference generation and story comprehension because we were interested in how children’s ability to make inferences generalized to their story comprehension abilities. We already know from the studies described above that children’s inferences during or after listening to a particular narrative are related to their comprehension of that same narrative. However, an even more stringent examination of the relationship between inference generation and story comprehension would be to examine these two skills with independent narrative tasks to determine if children’s ability to generate inferences is related to their comprehension of another unfamiliar story. As have others, the present work also examined the relationship between children’s basic language skills (i.e., receptive and expressive vocabulary) and their inferences and story comprehension. Other researchers have found that young children’s receptive vocabulary is significantly related to children’s story comprehension, and that the relationship between children’s inferences and story comprehension is still significant even after controlling for vocabulary (Kendeou et al., 2008; Lynch & van den Broek, 2007; Lynch et al., 2008). Such findings suggest that inferencing makes a unique contribution to children’s story comprehension (Kendeou et al., 2008; Lynch & van den Broek, 2007; Lynch et al., 2008). Kendeou et al., (2008) further argued that children’s inferential skills are relatively independent from their vocabulary knowledge. In the present study, we included measures of both expressive and receptive vocabulary; although the latter has been studied previously with respect to its relation to inferencing in young children, we included an expressive measure as our inference generation task relied heavily on children’s verbal production of a story. Thus, the present study controls for both children’s general verbal comprehension and production capabilities when examining the relationship between story comprehension and inferencing. Three research questions guided our investigation. Our first question was what do the on-line inferences of 4- to 5-year-old children look like? To our knowledge, the one prior study of on-line inferences in young children examined 6-year-olds’ inferences about goals only (Lynch & van den Broek, 2007). Our goal was to examine inferences of all types and with a younger age group, thus extending this extant body of work. Our second question was what is the relationship between children’s inferences and their story comprehension? We hypothesized that children’s inferences in the story generation task would be related to their story comprehension. Our third question was whether children’s inferences would predict their story comprehension after controlling for children’s age, vocabulary, and socioeconomic status (SES). In addressing this goal, the present work contributes to a literature examining whether children’s ability to draw inferences makes an independent contribution to comprehension above and beyond that of vocabulary skills.

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Methods Participants Families were recruited through child care centers in Central Florida and personal contacts of the first author. Families were provided with a $10 gift card for their participation. Forty-seven mothers and their 4- to 5-year-old children were recruited to participate in a larger study examining mother–child narratives and children’s early literacy skills. Only the data regarding children’s language and comprehension skills will be discussed further. Of these 47 dyads, five children did not have complete data sets. The resulting 42 children ranged in age from 46 to 70 months (M = 57.40, SD = 6.40). There were 20 males and 22 females. Thirty-three children were Caucasian, three were African-American, three were Hispanic, one was Asian, and two children were bi-racial. Based on mothers’ self-reports, there was modest variability in terms of children’s SES, as mothers’ years of education ranged from 13 to 20 years (M = 16.47, SD = 2.24). An income-to-needs ratio was calculated based on family income and number of family members with 1.00 representing the poverty line. Income-to-needs ratios ranged from 1.01 to 13.74 (M = 4.47, SD = 2.94). General procedure After signed parental consent was obtained, each child was seen individually at his or her preschool or in a few cases, the child’s home. Children were typically seen over two to three sessions lasting approximately 20–30 min each. The presentation of tasks was given in a fixed order representing what was expected to be the least to the most challenging for preschoolers: receptive vocabulary, expressive vocabulary, a print concepts assessment, story comprehension, a picture sequencing task, and story generation. The print concepts and picture sequencing tasks are not central to the current study and will not be discussed further. After individual assessments were complete, mothers and children participated in three narrative interactions and mothers completed a questionnaire which included questions regarding mothers’ education and family income. These two measures of SES are used as control variables in later analyses. Materials and procedure Vocabulary Children’s language was measured using standardized assessments of receptive and expressive vocabulary. The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-4th edition (Dunn & Dunn, 2007) was used to assess receptive vocabulary. The Expressive Vocabulary Test-2nd edition (Williams, 2006) was used to measure expressive vocabulary. The PPVT-4 and the EVT-2 are normed on the same sample and produce both a raw score (i.e., total number of items correct) as well as a standard score based on norms for the child’s age group. A standard score of 100 is considered average.

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Story comprehension Because there are very few standardized assessments available to assess preschoolers’ narrative comprehension, researchers often rely on existing children’s books or they create their own narrative tasks to assess preschoolers’ comprehension. These researchers use the term narrative comprehension broadly; thus, this term has several meanings, including children’s spontaneous reactions to books, the number of events children recall from a story, sensitivity to the causal structure of a story, and answers to comprehension questions about a story (Kendeou et al., 2008; Paris & Paris, 2003). We chose to assess what we will call story comprehension, which refers to children’s comprehension of the narrative events within a storybook as it is read to them. Several researchers have adapted story comprehension measures from existing storybooks by creating questions that are asked at predetermined points in a story that assess both children’s literal and inferential understanding of the story (e.g., Beals & De Temple, 1993; Reese & Cox, 1999; Reese, 1995; Sonnenschein & Munsterman, 2002; van Kraayenoord & Paris, 1996). We chose to adopt the story comprehension task created by Paris and Paris (2003) because, to our knowledge, this is one of the few measures of comprehension for pre-readers for which there is information on validity and reliability. This story comprehension task is part of a larger narrative comprehension assessment that examines other comprehension measures, such as narrative recall; however, we focused only on the story comprehension component in the present study. The children’s book, Sergio Makes a Splash (Rodriguez, 2008), which is about a penguin who is afraid to swim, was used to assess children’s story comprehension. We asked children the same types of story comprehension questions used by Paris and Paris (2003), although we chose a different storybook. Paris and Paris (2003) were interested in children’s comprehension of a wordless book after children had created the story of the book on their own. We, however, were interested in examining children’s comprehension of a book with text as it was read by an adult, which is more consistent with previous measures of pre-readers’ story comprehension (e.g., Reese & Cox, 1999; Sonnenschein & Munsterman, 2002). Thus, we chose a children’s book with text that allowed for the same 10 comprehension questions used by Paris and Paris (2003). An experimenter read the storybook to the child as it was printed and stopped at seven points throughout the story to ask children questions; an additional three questions were asked at the end of the story with the book closed, which is consistent with Paris and Paris (2003). As shown in Appendix 1, five questions assessed children’s literal understanding of the story (the initiating event, the overarching goal, characters, the setting, and the outcome resolution) and five questions assessed children’s ability to make inferences (dialogue, causal inference, feelings, predicting what happens next, and the theme). Questions were considered inferences if the answers to the questions were not directly stated in the text of the book. Story generation We used a wordless picture book for the story generation task for several reasons. As Paris and Paris (2003) argued, wordless books eliminate the constraints of decoding.

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That is, children’s comprehension is not limited by their ability to decode text so comprehension can be assessed independently of children’s ability to decode print. Paris and Paris (2003) pointed out that decoding facilitates comprehension; thus, it is important to create assessments of young children’s comprehension that are independent of their decoding skills so that decoding and comprehension are not confounded. Additionally, wordless books allow researchers to assess children’s understanding of the same types of narrative structure that are present in the text of children’s books, such as making causal and temporal connections between pages and identifying main story elements (Paris and Paris, 2003). Another reason for using a wordless book to elicit stories from children is that others have found pictures to be facilitative of inference making. Holmes (1987) found that fifth and sixth grade students did significantly better answering inferential questions about a text when it was accompanied by pictures compared to when the text was presented alone. This indicates that even for older children, pictures can facilitate comprehension of a story. The book used for the story generation task, from which children’s inferences were assessed, was the wordless book Frog Goes to Dinner (Mayer, 1992). This book contains 30 black and white drawings and is about a boy and his family who go to a fancy restaurant for dinner. However, his mischievous frog joins him and then causes chaos in the restaurant until the frog can be captured and returned home. Researchers using this and similar wordless books have shown that between the ages of 3 and 5, children increasingly include goals and causally structured sequences in their narratives (Trabasso & Nickels, 1992; Trabasso & Rodkin, 1994; Trabasso & Stein, 1994). Thus, we expected that 4- to 5-year-olds in this sample would be able to generate inferences while narrating this story. Children were presented with the book and told: This is a special book because it has no words in it. I need you to help tell me the story. The story is called Frog Goes to Dinner. The experimenter then opened the book to the first page and gave an open-ended prompt, such as what’s happening? If children did not begin to narrate the story, one specific prompt was given, such as what is the boy doing? Other than this specific prompt on the first page, only openended prompts (e.g., Tell me what’s happening here) were provided throughout the rest of the book. Many children, however, required no additional prompts once they began narrating the story. This task was audio recorded for later transcription. Socioeconomic status Finally, SES was assessed as part of the questionnaire given to mothers, which asked mothers to indicate their highest level of education, as well as their family income. Mothers were also asked to list all family members living in the home (e.g., father, siblings) so that the family income-to-needs ratio could be calculated. Data were unavailable for two mothers—one mother’s response could not be interpreted and one mother did not complete the questionnaire. Scoring story comprehension We adapted the scoring of the story comprehension task used by Paris and Paris (2003) to the specific content of our chosen book—Sergio Makes a Splash

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(Rodriguez, 2008). See Appendix 2 for the scoring of the story comprehension questions. For each of the 10 questions children received a score of 0 for an incorrect response or no response, a score of one for a response that described a single picture, and a score of two for a response that integrated information across pictures. For example, in one question the experimenter says to the child Tell me what Sergio is feeling in this picture, followed by Why do you think so? Children received one point for saying that Sergio was scared, and a second point for explaining that he was scared because he did not want to swim. Thus, each child received a total comprehension score ranging from 0 to 20. Reliability was calculated by determining what percentage of the 10 story comprehension questions were given the same score by two scorers. Approximately 25 % of the tasks were scored for reliability, which was 94 % agreement. Coding inference generation The story generation task was transcribed verbatim, and children’s utterances were parsed into subject-verb phrases. In a narrated or written task, an inference would be considered any conclusions drawn from the story that were not explicitly stated. Coding inferences from children’s narrations of a wordless book presents specific challenges compared to children’s retelling of an event for which the narrative content was provided. Specifically, we had to determine what would be considered an inference based on each of the 30 pictures contained in Frog Goes to Dinner. Thus, the first author in collaboration with a research assistant created a narrative that detailed only the most literal information provided in each picture of the book, such that any interpretation beyond that literal description could be considered an inference. For example, page 3 of Frog Goes to Dinner shows the initiating event of the story in which the frog’s head is shown peeking out of the boy’s jacket pocket as the boy is walking out the door. In this example, a statement that the frog was in the boy’s pocket would not receive a code for an inference, whereas a statement that the frog was going to go to dinner with the boy would be considered an inference. The narrative containing the literal information, against which inferences were identified, may be acquired from the first author. We based our coding of inferences on prior schemes used by Kendeou et al. (2008) and McGinnis et al. (2008), which included a large catalog of inference types to include: goals, actions, causal antecedents, causal consequences, activities, character states, character dialogue, character emotions, place, and objects. Although as mentioned above, researchers have most often focused on goals and causal relations in children’s inferences, we were also interested in what the inferences of young children would like in general as little research has focused on preschoolers’ inferences. Thus, for each child’s narrative, frequency of inferences of each of the 10 inference types was calculated as well as a total inferences score. Details regarding how each category was defined and examples of each are provided in Appendix 3. Approximately 25 % of the narratives were coded by two raters and inter-rater agreement was very good (K = .82).

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Results The data were examined for outliers, skewness, and kurtosis. No univariate outliers were identified. To determine whether multivariate outliers existed, Mahalanobis distance was used to sort all of the cases. We used the probability estimate of p \ .001 to identify possible outliers (Tabachnick & Fidell, 2000). This procedure did not show any multivariate outliers. All the skewness and kurtosis values fell within the acceptable ranges. To examine our first research question regarding what the on-line inferences of 4- to 5-year-old children were like, we conducted descriptive analyses for children’s inferences. As shown in Table 1, which also includes information about children’s vocabulary scores, total inferences were variable across individual children (ranging from 6 to 67). The mean of total inferences was 28.86 (SD = 14.5). The following are descriptive differences among all the categories of inference generation. Character activity was used most frequently by children (M = 10.6, SD = 5.15). Children also were more likely to use character state (M = 4.88, SD = 4.36) than the other categories of inference generation. Children produced more character dialogue (M = 2.43, SD = 3.9) and emotion inferences (M = 3.1, SD = 2.54) than goal (M = 1.48, SD = .94) and action inferences (M = 1.6, SD = 1.68). Preschoolers rarely used inferences related to causal relations (causal consequence: M = .69, SD = 1.47; causal antecedent: M = 1.17, SD = 1.48). See Appendices 4 and 5 for examples of narratives that included few inferences and many inferences, respectively.

Table 1 Descriptive statistics for child language, inferences, and story comprehension Variable

M

SD

Range

Receptive vocabulary (PPVT) standard

105.31

12.65

79–133

Expressive vocabulary (EVT) standard

112.19

11.47

97–135

1.48

0.97

0–3

Goal inferences Action inferences

1.60

1.68

0–6

Character state inferences

4.88

4.36

0–17

5.17

1–23

Character activity inferences

10.6

Object inferences

1.14

1.41

0–5

Causal antecedent inferences

1.17

1.48

0–5

Causal consequence inferences

.69

1.47

0–6

Character dialogue inferences

2.43

3.90

0–20

Character emotions inferences

3.10

2.54

0–9

Place inferences

1.79

1.52

0–6

Total inferences

28.86

14.50

6–67

6.05

2.20

2–9

Story comprehension-inference

5.21

2.01

1–10

Story comprehension-total score

11.26

3.74

4–19

Story comprehension-literal

PPVT the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, EVT the Expressive Vocabulary Test

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Our second research question was whether children’s inference generation (assessed with children’s narration of a wordless book) would be related to their story comprehension (answers to literal and inferential questions as an adult read a different book). We hypothesized that these two skills would be significantly related. We examined bivariate correlations between all categories of children’s inferences and story comprehension. The strength of the relations can be interpreted based on Cohen’s suggestions that correlations above .50 are large and correlations above .30 are medium (Cohen, 1992). As displayed in Table 2, children’s total story comprehension scores were significantly correlated with total inferences, r = .38, p \ .05. The medium-sized relationship confirms our hypothesis that story comprehension would be significantly related to children’s inferences. More specifically, the inference categories of goals, actions, and character states were significantly related to children’s story comprehension. Our third research question was whether children’s inferences while narrating the wordless storybook would predict their answers on the story comprehension task after controlling for children’s age, vocabulary, and SES. We conducted a series of hierarchical regression analyses; given the limited sample size of the present study, we first examined several parsimonious models for the purpose of saving degrees of freedom in the final model. As age and SES may be associated with children’s story comprehension, we tested each variable as a predictor in the model separately. The predictors reaching statistical significance (p \ .05) stayed in the model as covariate variables. Children’s age and SES (mothers’ education level and family income) were entered in the model and only children’s age was a significant predictor of overall story comprehension. Thus, the variable of children’s age was used as a covariate for the analysis and raw scores of expressive and receptive vocabulary were used in the following regression analysis. We found that in this sample, receptive vocabulary was not a significant predictor of overall story comprehension (b = .18, p = .28) when child age was controlled and perhaps due to its high correlation with expressive vocabulary (r = .76, p \ .01). In order to obtain a simpler and more parsimonious model with fewer estimated parameters, we focused only on child expressive vocabulary in the current study. In these analyses, we entered child age at step 1, expressive vocabulary at step 2, and total inferences at step 3. The dependent variable was overall story comprehension. Table 3 presents the standardized associations of the predictors of children’s overall story comprehension. The analysis showed that children’s expressive vocabulary was a significant predictor of their overall story comprehension (b = .42, p = .02) and uniquely explained 13 % of the variance in story comprehension (R2D = .13, F (2, 39) = 7.92, p \ .01) above that accounted for by children’s age. Children’s total inferences did not significantly predict overall story comprehension (b = .12, p = .53) when child age and expressive vocabulary were controlled. Although the association between children’s total inferences and story comprehension was not significant when controlling for age and vocabulary, the previously described correlation analysis demonstrated that three categories of children’s inferences—goal, action, and character state—were significantly correlated with story comprehension. A follow-up analysis was conducted to examine whether the

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* p \ .05

** p \ .01

12. Story comprehension score

11. Total inferences

10. Inference: place

9. Inference: character emotions

8. Inference: character dialogue

7. Inference: causal consequences

6. Inference: causal antecedent

5. Inference: object

4. Inference: character activity

3. Inference: character state

2. Inference: action

1. Inference: goal

–

1

.57**

–

2

.38*

.20 –

3

.22

.18

.22

–

4

.33*

.01

.30

.45**

–

5

Table 2 Correlations between children’s inference and story comprehension

.23

.40**

.35*

.41**

.23

–

6

–

7

.32*

.26

.30

.14

.41**

.33*

.33*

.06

.27

.47**

.36*

.19

–

-.09

8

–

.04

.19

.20

.06

.10

.48**

.28

.26

9

–

-.03

.12

.34*

.42**

.62**

.33*

-.06

.41**

.42**

10

–

.45**

.46**

.61**

.42**

.64**

.43**

.69**

.69**

.63**

.51**

11

–

.38*

.27

.13

.10

.21

.21

.18

.20

.35*

.32*

.40**

12

416 V. Tompkins et al.


417

Table 3 Summary of hierarchical regression analysis predicting overall story comprehension Variable

b

t(1, 40)

.42**

2.96

DR2

Overall story comprehension Step 1 Child age Step 2 Child age

.15

.83

Expressive vocabulary

.42*

2.44

.11*

Step 3 Child age

.07

.31


.42*

2.36

Total inference

.12

.63

.07

* p \ .05 ** p \ .01

association between children’s story comprehension and their inferences which included only goal, action, and character state, rather than all the categories was significant. Table 4 presents the results of the follow-up hierarchical regression analysis. The sum of goal, action, and character state inferences significantly predicted story comprehension (b = .33, p = .05) and uniquely explained 7 % of the variance in story comprehension (R2D = .07, F (3, 38) = 7, p \ .01) when children’s age and expressive vocabulary were controlled. This finding suggests that some types of inferences, but not all, make a unique contribution to story comprehension above and beyond basic language skill and age. As a complement to these analyses, we also examined the relationship between children’s total inferences and their story comprehension by categorizing children into a low-inference and a high-inference category based on a median split of the

Table 4 Summary of follow-up hierarchical regression analysis predicting overall story comprehension Variable

b

t(1, 40)

DR2

Overall story comprehension Step 1 Child age

.42**

2.96

Step 2 Child age

.15

.83


.43*

2.44

.11**

Step 3 Child age

-.08

-.40


.47**

2.76

Inference (goal, action, character state)

.33*

1.99

.07*

* p \ .05 ** p \ .01

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V. Tompkins et al.

data. The resulting groups consisted of 21 children in the low-inference group (M = 16.95; range: 6–24 total inferences) and 21 children in the high-inference group (M = 40.76; range: 26–67 total inferences). An independent-samples t-test showed that children in the high-inference group scored significantly higher on the story comprehension task than children in the low-inference group, t = 2.10, p \ .05. Results were identical when dividing children into low- and high-inference groups based only on the three inference categories from the last regression (goals, actions, character states), t = 2.10, p \ .05.

Discussion The purpose of this study was to examine the inferences preschoolers make when narrating a story, and to assess whether these inferences were related to their story comprehension. Unlike other studies of young children’s inferences, which have examined children’s inferences while retelling a narrative (Kendeou et al., 2008; Lynch et al., 2008), we examined children’s on-line inferences—that is, the inferences they made as they narrated a novel story. Although Lynch and van den Broek (2007) also adopted this approach, they examined inferences in 6- and 8-year-olds and measured only goal inferences. Thus, the current study extends both studies by examining on-line inferences in younger children (4- to 5-year-olds) and examining all possible inferences, not just goal inferences. Another contribution of the current study was the examination of story comprehension using a different story than was used to elicit children’s inferences. Whereas previous researchers have used the same story to measure children’s inferences (whether on-line or recalled) and children’s story comprehension (Kendeou et al., 2008; Lynch et al., 2008; Lynch & van den Broek, 2007), we chose to use independent stories as a more rigorous test of the association between children’s ability to make inferences and their story comprehension. Our first research question was what the on-line inferences of 4- to 5-year-old children would look like as researchers have not examined the on-line inferences of children this young. We found a great deal of variability in the number of inferences that children made, which ranged from 6 to 67/child. Consistent with previous research on preschoolers’ narrative production (see Trabasso & Stein, 1997 for a review), we found that the children in our sample most frequently made inferences about concrete activities of characters (e.g., the frog jumped on the table), which we distinguished from actions referring to how goals were achieved. Children also mentioned inferences about character states, dialogue, and emotions relatively frequently in their narratives, suggesting that they paid particular attention to what characters were thinking or saying. Finally, children made relatively few inferences regarding goals, actions, objects, causal antecedents and consequences, or places. The present research is interesting for its cataloging of the full range of inferences that young children may produce, but then considering which types of these, if any, may uniquely relate to comprehension. In this regard, our second research question was whether children’s inferences were related to their story comprehension. We hypothesized that children’s

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inferences in the story generation task would be related to their story comprehension. In support of our hypothesis, we found that children’s total inferences were significantly related to children’s story comprehension, which was assessed independently from the story generation task from which inferences were measured. The correlational analyses suggested, however, that only certain inference categories—goals, actions, and character states—significantly related to children’s story comprehension. Kendeou et al. (2008), whose inference categories we adopted, did not report correlations between story comprehension and specific inference categories. However, they did find that children’s total inferences and comprehension of the same narrative were significantly related in 4-, 6-, and 8-yearolds. Thus, our study provides further support for the relationship between young children’s inferences and story comprehension, and further identifies the specific types of inferences that may be related to the ability to comprehend a story. Our third research question was whether children’s inferences would predict their story comprehension after controlling for children’s age, vocabulary, and SES. SES was not retained in the model as it was not a significant predictor of children’s story comprehension after controlling for age. Because of our small sample size, we examined total inferences as a predictor of story comprehension, rather than each inference category separately. We found that after controlling for age and expressive vocabulary, which was a better predictor of story comprehension than receptive vocabulary, children’s total inferences no longer predicted their story comprehension. However, when only examining those inferences that were significantly correlated with story comprehension (goals, actions, and character states), we found that these inferences significantly predicted children’s story comprehension after controlling for children’s age and expressive vocabulary. Kendeou et al. (2008), who had a larger sample, also measured the influence of each inference type on children’s narrative comprehension (sum of three measures, including comprehension questions). They found that for 4-year-olds, inferences about goals, actions, and causal antecedents significantly predicted children’s comprehension of the same story after controlling for children’s basic language skills, vocabulary, and media type (aural or television). Thus, our results are very similar in that in both studies inferences about goals and actions were particularly important in predicting children’s comprehension. In the current study, inferences about goals and actions were relatively low in frequency. However, children’s ability to make these central inferences was related to their ability to comprehend a different story. Inferences about goals and actions to achieve those goals are argued to be central to comprehending a narrative because they explain characters’ actions throughout the story (Lynch & van den Broek, 2007). In the Frog Goes to Dinner story, goals included going out to dinner initially, and then later in the narrative, the goal was to remove the frog from the restaurant. Lynch and van den Broek (2007) argued that to comprehend a narrative, one must understand how the goals are connected to other parts of the story. The results from the current study suggest that children who could identify the essential goals of the frog story and the actions that achieved these goals were better able to comprehend a story as it was being read, perhaps because they could identify the goals in the story comprehension task (e.g., Sergio needed to learn

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to swim) and make connections with that overarching goal and other events or reactions in the story. In the current study, character states were also a significant predictor of children’s story comprehension after controlling for children’s age and expressive vocabulary. Character states was a broad category including inferences about characters’ thoughts (e.g., There was a frog inside, and they didn’t even know) and perceptions (e.g., He didn’t see the frog), among other states. These types of inferences, along with goals and actions, have been included in the category of causal inferences, which is argued to be the most critical type of inferences for comprehending a story (van Kleeck, 2008). The results from the current study suggest that children who are better able to recognize these key elements, such as understanding what the protagonist is thinking and seeing, are also better at comprehending a story as it is read to them and answering questions regarding the causal relations among events in the story. This suggestion was also supported by the median split analyses in which we examined low- and high-inference making children and found that children in the high-inference group had significantly higher story comprehension scores compared to children in the low-inference group. Practical implications This study has practical implications for the design of reading interventions. Some researchers have pointed out that the ways in which researchers have assessed comprehension and have designed reading interventions have focused on the products of comprehension; that is, researchers often measure readers’ comprehension after reading a story (Lynch & van den Broek, 2007; Rapp et al., 2007). However, Rapp et al. (2007) argued that we should focus on the processes of comprehension, or what children do during reading, to better understand how comprehension may fail in struggling readers. As Oakhill et al. (2003) pointed out, it is more beneficial to measure the component of the reading process that is causing children difficulty rather than examining the end result (e.g., a comprehension task) and trying to determine where the comprehension failure occurred. Thus, assessing on-line inferences in young children as we did in this study may be a useful tool for identifying children who do not adequately comprehend the narrative and at precisely what point in the story they are failing to comprehend relevant information. For example, in the current study, some children made no references to goals in the frog story. Thus, children who do not readily recognize these crucial parts of the story may benefit when these aspects of the story are highlighted by an adult. Targeting these crucial inferences in young children before they are reading for meaning on their own could potentially provide them with the tools necessary to comprehend text once they begin formal reading instruction. This emphasis on comprehension does not imply that instruction focusing on more basic reading skills (e.g., word decoding) should be reduced. However, researchers argue that many children still have difficulty comprehending text even when code-related skills are good or have been controlled for (Oakhill, Hartt, & Samols, 2005). Thus, researchers argue that code-related skills are not enough to be a successful reader (Kendeou et al., 2005) and that supporting children’s

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development of skills that help them to comprehend texts well should be an important and early focus of reading instruction. The current study also suggests that using a think-aloud protocol with wordless books is feasible with preschool aged children. Lynch and van den Broek (2007), who assessed 6- and 8-year-olds’ on-line goal inferences as they listened to an adult narrate a story, pointed out that their study was the first to assess whether thinkaloud protocols would be feasible with children as young as 6 years old. Paris and Paris (2003) also used a think-aloud procedure to examine children’s narrations of a wordless book in kindergarten through 2nd grade children, although they did not specifically examine children’s generation of inferences during this task. Using a combination of these two methodologies, the current study showed that using a think-aloud assessment is feasible in children as young as 4- to 5-year-olds to assess their on-line inferences, and that wordless books are a useful and developmentally appropriate stimulus for this activity. Limitations and future directions One limitation of the current study is that we were unable to address whether children’s inferences and story comprehension were causally related. Studies by Cain et al. (2004) suggest that inference making is causally related to older children’s (8- to 11-year-olds) reading comprehension (Cain & Oakhill, 1999; Cain et al., 2004). However, it is unclear from the current study whether having better inference skills leads to better story comprehension in preschoolers. A related limitation is that we did not address inference and story comprehension skills longitudinally, which could further elucidate how these two skills develop over time. Although Kendeou et al. (2008) did assess children’s inferences during recall of a story and their comprehension of the same story at age 4 and later at age 6, they only examined the relationship between inferences and comprehension at each age separately. Future studies could examine how these two skills are related by examining preschoolers’ inferencing and story comprehension skills longitudinally or in experimental designs. Another limitation of this study was the small sample size. Unlike Kendeou et al. (2008), we were not able to examine the influence of each inference category separately in the hierarchical regression analyses given limited power. Future studies of preschoolers with larger samples could further identify the unique influence of each type of inference category on comprehension. A related issue concerns the generalizability of this work. With the relatively small and somewhat homogenous sample, it is unclear whether the results generalize to more diverse groups of children, such as children who may have language difficulties due to disabilities or poverty. A benefit of our study is that it provides a new way to examine inference making in pre-readers. However, more research using this methodology is clearly needed. Future research could compare the different methods that have been used to elicit young children’s inferences. For example, researchers could directly compare our method of assessing children’s inference generation with Lynch and van den Broek (2007)’s approach in which an experimenter presented a story aurally (with an audio

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recording) to 6- to 8-year-olds and stopped at six predetermined points to ask children to reflect on what was happening in the story. These two approaches differ in the demand of the task in that children in our study had to create the entire story on their own, whereas Lynch and van den Broek’s approach required the child to listen and provide inferences at six points in the story. Another important difference, however, is that in our task children had the aid of the pictures. A further manipulation could compare children’s inferences when listening to a story with and without accompanying pictures. Researchers could also directly compare our method of assessing children’s inference generation with Kendeou et al. (2008)’s approach in which they measured 4- and 6-year-olds’ inferences by asking them to recall stories after listening to them. That is, researchers could compare children’s ability to make inferences on their own with a wordless book to their ability to make inferences after hearing a narrated story. It is not clear whether children would perform similarly on these different types of inferencing tasks; future research could further examine whether children provide more inferences when narrating a story on their own, recalling a story, or responding to a limited number of points in a story as well as when and how pictures may aid in their inference making. Acknowledgments We would like to thank the families and child care centers who participated in this study. We would also like to thank Sarah Helton for her assistance in the development of the coding scheme and coding of the narratives.

Appendix 1 See Table 5.

Table 5 Questions for the story comprehension task (Sergio Makes a Splash) Question type

Story description

Question

Initiating event (literal)

Sergio can’t swim

Tell me what happens at this point in the story. What is Sergio afraid of?

Goal (literal)

Mrs. Waddle tells the class that they are going to learn to swim

If you were telling someone this story, what would you say is going on now? What did Mrs. Waddle tell the class?

Dialogue (inference)

Mrs. Waddle asks Sergio what’s wrong

What do you think Sergio is saying here? Why would he be saying that?

Causal inference (inference)

Sergio’s friends reassure him

Why are his friends saying that?

Feelings (inference)

Sergio looks scared

Tell me what Sergio is feeling in this picture. Why do you think so?

Prediction (inference)

Sergio stands at the top of the cliff

What do you think happens next? Why do you think so?

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Table 5 continued Question type

Story description

Question

Outcome resolution (literal)

Sergio jumped in. Now he is tired but happy

What happened here? Why does this happen?

Characters (literal)

Book closed

Who were the characters in this story?

Setting (literal)

Book closed

Where did this story happen?

Theme (inference)

Book closed

In thinking about everything that you learned after reading this book, if you knew that your friend couldn’t swim what would you tell him/her to make him/her feel better? Why would you tell him/her that?

Story comprehension questions were adapted from Paris and Paris (2003)


Table 6 Scoring for the story comprehension task (Sergio Makes a Splash) Question type

Story Description

Initiating event (literal)

2 points: child identifies the initiating event (e.g., Sergio can’t swim) and links it to the previous page (e.g., because Sergio is afraid of the water) 1 point: child identifies the initiating event (e.g., Sergio can’t swim)

Goal (literal)

2 points: child identifies the goal of the story (e.g., they are going to learn to swim) 1 point: child identifies an action without the overarching goal (e.g., they are swimming)

Dialogue (inference)

2 points: child suggests appropriate dialogue (e.g., Sergio tells his teacher he does not want to swim) and connects the dialogue to a previous page (e.g., Sergio is afraid of deep water) 1 point: child suggests appropriate dialogue without connecting the dialogue to a previous event

Causal inference (inference)

2 points: child explains why Sergio’s friends reassure him by referencing a previous page (e.g., because they know he’s afraid) 1 point: child’s response is limited to the current page (e.g., because they want him to swim)

Feelings (inference)

2 points: child identifies appropriate emotion (e.g., scared, afraid) and connects the emotion to a previous page (e.g., because he is afraid to swim) 1 point: child identifies appropriate emotion (e.g., scared, afraid)

Prediction (inference)

2 points: child provides an appropriate prediction (e.g., Sergio will jump) and connects the action to a previous page (e.g., He’s going to try to swim) 1 point: child’s prediction is limited to the current page (e.g., Sergio jumps)

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Table 6 continued Question type

Story Description

Outcome resolution (literal)

2 points: child identifies what happened (e.g., Sergio went swimming) and connects the outcome to a previous page (e.g., because he tried) 1 point: child only identifies the outcome (e.g., Sergio went swimming)

Characters (literal)

2 points: child identifies Sergio and at least one other character (e.g., Mrs. Waddle, Sergio’s friends) 1 point: child identifies Sergio

Setting (literal)

2 points: child’s response includes more than one setting (e.g., water, south pole, school, school bus) 1 point: child’s response includes only one setting

Theme (inference)

2 points: child’s provides advice based on the theme of the story (e.g., it’s just water) and provides an explanation (e.g., because they are scared) 1 point: child provides advice without an explanation

Story comprehension scoring was adapted from Paris and Paris (2003)


Table 7 Coding of inferences for the story generation task (Frog Goes to Dinner) Inference type

Definition

Picture description

Example of inference

Goal

Motives of an agent

The boy is standing in front of the mirror putting on his tie

The boy is getting ready to go out to dinner

Action

How an agent’s goal is achieved

The boy and his family are sitting at the table with menus

They are ordering what they want to eat

Character state

A character’s thoughts, perceptions, role (e.g., mother), traits, or physical characteristics

The mom and sister are wearing dresses. The dad and boy are wearing suits

They are all dressed very nice

Character activity

A character’s activities that are not part of a goal

The frog is flying through the air

The frog jumped out of the boy’s pocket

Object

Mentioning a state or property of an object

The frog’s legs are shown coming out of the man’s saxophone

Something was wrong with the man’s instrument

Causal antecedent

A connection between the current event and the previous context

The frog’s legs are shown coming out of the man’s saxophone

The guy couldn’t play his saxophone because there was a frog in it

Causal consequence

An event unfolding from the current event

A woman sees a frog peeking out of her salad

The lady sees the frog and then falls out of her chair

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Table 7 continued Inference type

Definition

Picture description

Example of inference

Character dialogue

A character’s utterances

The waiter has caught the frog and is taking it to the door

The little boy says: Hey, that’s my frog!

Character emotions

The feelings experienced by a character in response to an event

Mom, dad, and sister are walking away frowning

His family was so mad at him for bringing the frog

Place

Mentioning place or setting

Dad is pointing while the boy is walking away

The little boy is sent to his room

Codes adapted from Kendeou et al. (2008) and McGinnis et al. (2008)

Appendix 4 See Table 8. Table 8 Example of a narrative with few inferences Child: 1 day there’s a boy

Child: I don’t know what the frog’s doing

Child: xxx

Child: What father’s doing either

Child: Ah there’s a mama

Child: There’s the frog or something

Child: And this is the boy

Child: Ah!

Child: And this is the dog

Child: He just jump in there

Child: This is the dog

Child: On her face

Child: And this is the turtle

Child: That’s silly


Child: And he jumped to the food and eats

Child: And this is the frog

Child: Up to the xxx

Child: And this is the girl

Child: Hungry

Child: And this is the mom

Child: Uh-oh he’s gonna eat her!


Child: And eat her

Child: And that’s the beast

Child: He jump out of the food

Child: And that’s and that’s the dad

Child: Jump out!

Child: And that’s the mom

Child: And he gonna eat him.

Child: And that’s the girl

Child: Right?

Child: And that’s the boy

Child: Ah!

Child: And the frog

Child: Spoink

Child: Nah, there’s a boy

Child: Ah!

Child: And there’s a girl

Child: He’s lookin at him

Child: And there’s the mom

Child: 1 day he’ll wipe swipe at him

Child: There’s a mama and there’s a girl

Child: Uh-oh he got him

Child: And there’s I don’t know what this one is

Child: He gonna put him in the cake

Child: No that ain’t right

Child: And that’s it Child: The end

Female 4:1 xxx unintelligible word

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Table 9 Example of a narrative with many inferences Child: The boy gets ready to dress for the dinner

Child: And then the family is mad except for him

Child: And he’s bringing frog and dog

Child: His family is mad

Child: Maybe just frog

Child: And he headed to his room

Child: And he leaves him

Child: The end

Child: He gives dog right on his head Child: And waves goodbye Child: And then he tries to read the sign Child: His dad talks to him Child: And then they get their menu Child: And the frog jumps to get closer to the band Child: He gets inside under the instrument Child: And then it does, it makes a weird noise Child: And he doesn’t know what’s in there Child: And then the frog falls out and lands on his face Child: And then he falls into the drum and it breaks the drum Child: And then the band is mad Child: And then the frog jumps to get some food Child: And then someone is about to eat it Child: They figure out like there’s a frog in there Child: The frog jumps out, hops into the drink Child: The lady is mad Child: And the man is about to drink Child: The frog gets out, jumps on the table Child: The man is about to get him Child: Someone is about to pass out Child: Man goes where throw the frog out Child: And the kid doesn’t want it to go Child: And then they have to go Child: They have to get evacuate Child: They got the frog back Child: Went back to their seat or back or back to their car Male 5:10 xxx an unintelligible word

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