Children's use of schemata in comprehension and recall of narrative texts

Six- to ten-year-olds listened to and were tested on memory for two simple narrative stories. The structure of both stories could be represented as a hierarchy when analyzed according to a story grammar. In experiment 1, children recalled the stories from memory. Like adults, children in all age groups recalled high-level information in the hierarchy better than low-level information. In addition, information central to the story was recalled better than tangential details. Results suggest that even young children possess and use knowledge of narrative structures during comprehension. In experiment 2, children answered questions requiring retrieval of facts. Again, performance improved with age and was superior for thematically important facts. The similarity between the free and cued recall results suggests that performance differences were due to different encoding skills rather than to differences in generation or articulation processes. However, developmental differences in encoding ability appear to be independent of knowledge of narrative structure.