van den Broek P, Lorch E P, Thurlow R
Department of Educational Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis 55455, USA.
Child Dev. 1996 Dec;67(6):3010-28.
What events from televised stories do preschool children and adults remember? In this study, we examined the extent to which 4-year-old and 6-year-old children's and adults' free recall of events from "Sesame Street" stories is determined by the role the events play in the story structure. Events varied with respect to 4 structural properties: number of causal connections, status on or off the story's causal chain, story-grammar category, and position in the story's hierarchical structure. There were systematic developmental differences in the effects of these properties on recall. First, memory at all ages was strongly influenced by the 2 causal factors, but effects of these factors increased with age. Second, children emphasized actions in their recall, whereas adults most frequently recalled protagonists' goals and events that initiated these goals. Third, children's recall increased as the hierarchical level of events increased, whereas adults most frequently recalled (causally more important) events at intermediate levels. These findings demonstrate that preschool children are already sensitive to structural features of televised narratives but that utilization of the causal-motivational structure of narratives increases systematically with age.
学龄前儿童和成年人会记住电视故事中的哪些事件？在本研究中，我们考察了4岁和6岁儿童以及成年人对《芝麻街》故事中事件的自由回忆在多大程度上取决于这些事件在故事结构中所起的作用。事件在4个结构属性方面存在差异：因果联系的数量、在故事因果链上的状态、故事语法类别以及在故事层次结构中的位置。这些属性对回忆的影响存在系统性的发展差异。首先，所有年龄段的记忆都受到两个因果因素的强烈影响，但这些因素的影响随着年龄的增长而增加。其次，儿童在回忆中强调动作，而成年人最常回忆主角的目标以及引发这些目标的事件。第三，儿童的回忆随着事件层次水平的提高而增加，而成年人最常回忆（因果关系上更重要的）中间层次的事件。这些发现表明，学龄前儿童已经对电视叙事的结构特征敏感，但对叙事因果动机结构的利用会随着年龄的增长而系统性地增加。
