Cain, K and Nash, HM (2011) The influence of connectives on young readers' processing and comprehension of text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 103 (2). 429 - 441. ISSN 0022-0663
Abstract
Connectives are cohesive devices that signal the relations between clauses and are critical to the construction of a coherent representation of a text's meaning. The authors investigated young readers' knowledge, processing, and comprehension of temporal, causal, and adversative connectives using offline and online tasks. In a cloze task, 10-year-olds were more accurate than 8-year-olds on temporal and adversative connectives, but both age groups differed from adult levels of performance (Experiment 1). When required to rate the "sense" of 2-clause sentences linked by connectives, 10-year-olds and adults were better at discriminating between clauses linked by appropriate and inappropriate connectives than were 8-year-olds. The 10-year-olds differed from adults only on the temporal connectives (Experiment 2). In contrast, online reading time measures indicated that 8-year-olds' processing of text is influenced by connectives as they read, in much the same way as 10-year-olds'. Both age groups read text more quickly when target 2-clause sentences were linked by an appropriate connective compared with texts in which a connective was neutral (and), inappropriate to the meaning conveyed by the 2 clauses, or not present (Experiments 3 and 4). These findings indicate that although knowledge and comprehension of connectives is still developing in young readers, connectives aid text processing in typically developing readers.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | (c) 2011, American Psychological Association. This is an author produced version of a paper published in the Journal of Educational Psychology. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record. |
Keywords: | children; connectives; reading comprehension; text processing |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Medicine and Health (Leeds) > School of Psychology (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 11 Apr 2014 11:13 |
Last Modified: | 23 Jun 2023 21:38 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0022824 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | American Psychological Association |
Identification Number: | 10.1037/a0022824 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:78370 |