Abstract

BRANDAO, Ana Carolina Perrusi  and  SPINILLO, Alina Galvão. General and specific aspects in text comprehension. Psicol. Reflex. Crit. [online]. 1998, vol.11, n.2, pp. 253-272. ISSN 0102-7972.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0102-79721998000200006.

Different tasks are used to evaluate text comprehension abilities. Each of these is taken as the best way to evaluate such abilities. Nevertheless, it might be possible that different tasks assess different cognitive and linguistic mechanisms. This possibility was explored in 4- and 6-year-old children through two different tasks: reproduction of a story, and answers to inferential questions about the same story. In the analysis of the reproduction it was taken into account the level of similarity to the original text and the integration between sentences. The answers to the questions, were analysed according to its level of accuracy. Children’s performance improved with age. Some of the difficulties children had were related to certain parts of the story. It was also identified some specific aspects involved which appeared due to linguistic and cognitive requirements of the proposed task. The importance of those aspects in the process of text comprehension are emphasised.

Keywords : text comprehension; specific aspects; story; children.