Beal C R
Psychology Dept., Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755.
Child Dev. 1990 Aug;61(4):1011-23.
The goal of this research was to learn when children recognize that they make inferences to understand text, and how this knowledge affects their ability to revise text and to monitor its informativeness. In 4 experiments, first-, second-, and third-grade children (6-10 years) were presented with brief stories in which the physical cause of a target event was described explicitly, implied, or not mentioned in the text. In the first 3 experiments, children judged whether they had inferred the cause or if it had been explicitly mentioned in either the original or a revised version of the story. The results showed that for stories with implicit causes, first- and second-grade children tended to report that the causes had been explicitly mentioned, while third graders correctly reported that the causes were inferred. In the fourth experiment, children were asked to judge the difficulty of inferring the cause from problematic and ambiguous versions of the stories. Older children were more likely to report difficulties in inferring the target information. Third graders were also more likely to revise the texts to include additional information about the causes of the target events. The results show that younger children tend to attribute inferred information of the text, while older children clearly distinguish inferred and explicit text information.
本研究的目的是了解儿童何时认识到他们通过推理来理解文本，以及这种认知如何影响他们修改文本和监控文本信息性的能力。在4项实验中，研究人员向一、二、三年级的儿童（6至10岁）展示了简短的故事，其中目标事件的物理原因在文本中被明确描述、隐含提及或未被提及。在前3项实验中，儿童判断他们是推断出了原因，还是在故事的原始版本或修订版本中原因已被明确提及。结果显示，对于带有隐含原因的故事，一、二年级的儿童倾向于报告原因已被明确提及，而三年级的儿童则正确报告原因是推断出来的。在第4项实验中，儿童被要求判断从有问题和模糊的故事版本中推断原因的难度。年龄较大的儿童更有可能报告在推断目标信息时存在困难。三年级的儿童也更有可能修改文本，以纳入有关目标事件原因的更多信息。结果表明，年幼的儿童倾向于将文本中的信息归因于推断，而年龄较大的儿童则能清楚地区分推断出的文本信息和明确的文本信息。
