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Sequence of events in an example trial. The dot was blue. Note that a question was asked after each 20 of the 40 total texts
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In an experiment with 114 children aged 9–12 years, we compared the ability to establish local and global coherence of narrative texts between auditory and audiovisual (auditory text and pictures) presentation. The participants listened to a series of short narrative texts, in each of which a protagonist pursued a goal. Following each text, we coll...
Citations
... However, the textbase was negatively affected when the illustration showed after its corresponding text. Besides, Wannagat et al. (2021) also provide evidence that audiovisual presentation is better than auditory presentation in promoting the coherence formation of representation and children's story comprehension. ...
Based on the cross-channel connections between auditory and pictorial representations, it has been proposed that the presentation of coherent narration along with the picture and text content may enhance children’s story comprehension and vocabulary learning. The authors tested 40 four- to five-year-old Malaysian prereaders (17 Malays, 23 Chinese) for story comprehension while observing their eye movements to determine the degree to which the presence of pictures and/or text aids understanding of the narration and influences looking patterns. Both Malay and Chinese prereaders showed no interest in the printed text that was presented alongside the picture on the same page, which is consistent with earlier findings. This suggests that ethnic origins have little influence on how prereaders direct their visual attention to the relevant information for story comprehension. When there was no narration, they fixated longer on the text and less on the image, indicating that a significant amount of mental effort was required to process the words without verbal information. Regardless of stimulus congruency, storytelling performance affected how much children focused on target objects and keywords. More intriguingly, it was found that in Malay prereaders, there was a correlation between story comprehension and vocabulary skills across tasks. Additionally, Malay prereaders who performed well looked at the displayed stimuli longer than Chinese prereaders who performed well, especially when a narrator was presented alongside the visual stimulus. These novel findings are discussed along with their implications for multimedia learning and future research directions.
... Indeed, studies emerged in the context of narrative theory have shown that stories are not restricted to the verbal modality but can be conveyed non-linguistically through several expressive systems (Sibierska, 2017). An interesting issue in this regard is understanding the effects of specific expressive systems on narrative comprehension, i.e., if a change in the expressive medium is also tied to a change in the comprehension processes (e.g., Altun, 2021;Walsh, 2003;Wannagat et al., 2021). The present investigation addresses the issue of the expressive modalities of narrative through the lens of children's development. ...
... A crucial role in a narrative text is also played by characters' actions, motivations, and emotions (e.g., Bower and Rinck, 1999;Chiera et al., 2022;Lynch and van den Broek, 2007). Therefore, the construction of a coherent mental representation of a text requires an understanding of psychological/motivational causes of characters' actions (Wannagat et al., 2021). The major cognitive ability recruited for such a process is Theory of Mind (ToM). ...
... Overall, from the considerations made so far two different accounts emerge regarding the processing of visual and linguistic narratives. On one side, there are investigations indicating that the process of connecting the story's events is easier when narratives are presented in pictures (Wannagat et al., 2021;Pike et al., 2010), thus supporting the visual ease assumption. On the other, there are studies indicating that visual narrative processing is not straightforward: as shown by developmental findings reported above, when single pictures are inserted into a temporal and causal connected sequence of images comprising a story line, cognitive demands become higher. ...
The present study investigated the comprehension of narrative with reference to global coherence, i.e., the global representation of story meaning and connectedness, across two different expressive modalities: stories conveyed through written language and stories conveyed through sequences of images. Two cognitive abilities possibly underpinning such comprehension were assessed: Central Coherence (CC) and Theory of Mind (ToM). Two groups of children with typical development aged between 8.00 and 10.11 years were included in the study: 40 participants received the narrative comprehension task in the linguistic modality; 40 participants were administered the narrative comprehension task in the visual condition. Analyses revealed that a change in the expressive code used to convey narratives did not entail a change in the overall comprehension performance: children of the two groups performed similarly on the narrative task. As for the cognitive abilities, CC and ToM scores were positively correlated with narrative comprehension score only in the visual narrative comprehension task, and not in the linguistic one. Moreover, a regression analysis showed that, along with age, CC significantly predicted the visual narrative comprehension score. The implications of these results are discussed.
Learning Chinese Numeral Classifier-Noun (NCN)
phrases is one of the most challenging tasks for Chinese language learners. In this study, we developed learning applications based on a multimodal robot and loT tangible objects (R&T learning system to help Chinese language learners, adopting technologies suiting language learning, and implementing instructional design by professional Chinese language teachers. This study adopted the ASSURE model to develop and investigate the effect of the learning system and applications. Participants were divided into two groups: learning after a human teacher and learning with the R&T learning system. Findings from Table 1 show that learning Chinese NCN Phrases with the R&T learning system is comparable to the human teacher. This study contributes to Chinese language teaching and learning by providing an alternative method for Chinese language learners learning Chinese NCN phrases or a teaching assistant system for Chinese language teachers.
Using a sentence recognition task, we investigated whether elementary school children's (N = 92; Mage = 9.3 years, SD = 1.1 years) memory of the text surface, the textbase, and the situation model differed depending on whether the same information was embedded in an expository or a narrative text. Previous research with children that used narrative and expository texts dealing with different topics indicated beneficial effects narrative over expository texts regarding various indicators of processing on the levels of the textbase and the situation model. In contrast, our results did not indicate differences between narrative and expository texts for any of the levels of representation. Thus, the role of text topic in studies investigating the effect of genre on text comprehension should be investigated further.
In two experiments, we examined the effect of emphasizing protagonists’ goals within narrative texts on 8-year-olds’ ability to establish local and global coherence. The children were presented neutral and goal-emphasis versions of short goal-based narratives, either auditorily (Experiment 1, N=40) or audiovisually (auditory + pictures, Experiment 2, N=40). Then, the participants completed a word-recognition task by determining whether query words associated with protagonists’ superordinate or subordinate goals had occurred in the text. Response times served as indicators of global and local coherence. The results indicate that emphasizing protagonists’ goals promotes the process of establishing global (but not local) coherence in auditory texts. A comparable effect did not become apparent when the texts were presented audiovisually.
