van den Broek P
Department of Educational Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis 55455.
Child Dev. 1989 Apr;60(2):286-97.
The present study investigated the development of the ability to judge the importance of story statements on the basis of their causal properties. Key statements were varied with respect to 2 factors: in terms of the number of their causal relations, and in terms of the kinds of relations they had. Relations were either intraepisodic, that is, connecting statements in the same episode, or interepisodic, that is, connecting statements in different episodes. Children 8, 11, 14, and 18 years of age judged the importance of the statements. Children in all 4 age groups judged statements with many intraepisodic causal relations as more important than statements with few such relations. Only children 11 years and older judged statements as more important when they had interepisodic relations than when they did not. Thus, although young children may be sensitive to quantitative aspects of a statement's relational role within an episode, they may not be as aware of qualitative, that is, structural, differences between kinds of relations. Answers to why questions confirmed these patterns. Older children more often gave answers that crossed episodic boundaries than did the younger children. These findings may reflect age-related differences in children's ability to infer relations between statements and to integrate the information contained in stories. They also attest to the central role that causal inferences play in the interpretation of what is important information in stories.
本研究调查了根据故事陈述的因果属性来判断其重要性的能力的发展情况。关键陈述在两个因素方面有所不同：一是其因果关系的数量，二是它们所具有的关系类型。关系要么是情节内的，即连接同一情节中的陈述，要么是情节间的，即连接不同情节中的陈述。8岁、11岁、14岁和18岁的儿童对陈述的重要性进行了判断。所有4个年龄组的儿童都认为具有许多情节内因果关系的陈述比具有较少此类关系的陈述更重要。只有11岁及以上的儿童认为具有情节间关系的陈述比没有情节间关系的陈述更重要。因此，虽然幼儿可能对陈述在情节中的关系作用的数量方面很敏感，但他们可能没有那么意识到不同类型关系之间的质的差异，即结构差异。对“为什么”问题的回答证实了这些模式。年龄较大的儿童比年龄较小的儿童更常给出跨越情节界限的答案。这些发现可能反映了儿童在推断陈述之间的关系以及整合故事中包含的信息的能力方面与年龄相关的差异。它们也证明了因果推理在解释故事中重要信息时所起的核心作用。
