What Causes Children's Failures To Detect Inconsistencies in Text? : Representation vs. Comparison Difficulties. Technical Report No. 401 / Stella Vosniadou and Others.

Two experiments investigated whether elementary school children's difficulties in detecting inconsistencies in text are related to their failure (1) to represent each of two inconsistent propositions in memory or (2) to compare the representations of the inconsistent propositions to each other once each has been represented in memory. Overall, three kinds of inconsistencies were considered: falsehoods (a textual proposition that conflicts with a potentially known fact), factual contradictions (two textual propositions that conflict and one of these propositions is a potentially known fact), and textual contradictions (two textual propositions that conflict and neither is a known fact). In the first experiment, 80 first, third, and fifth grade children were asked to detect familiar falsehoods and unfamiliar factual contradictions in narratives. Results showed that the familiar falsehoods were easier to detect than the unfamiliar factual contradictions. When the familiarity variable was controlled in the second experiment, however, no differences in inconsistency detection were observed between the three variables. In both experiments, an analysis of the recall protocols indicated that detection failures were related more to incomplete recall of the inconsistent information than to difficulty in comparing the inconsistent propositions. Further, results indicated that children's inconsistency detection failures are related more to difficulties in forming accurate mental representations of textual propositions than to difficulties in comparing the inconsistent information once it is represented in memory. The results suggest that greater attention should be paid to the conditions that facilitate text representation, since those conditions are likely to affect comprehension monitoring as well. (Author/JD)

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