Finding New Meanings: Children's Recognition of Interpretive Ambiguity in Text

JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL CHILD PSYCHOLOGY ARTICLE NO.

62, 131–150 (1996)

0025

Finding New Meanings: Children’s Recognition of Interpretive Ambiguity in Text GARY J. BONITATIBUS Keene State College AND

CAROLE R. BEAL University of Massachusetts at Amherst This research was designed to investigate children’s developing ability to detect one form of interpretive uncertainty, specifically, that a text passage could support two alternative interpretations. Three experiments were conducted with second graders (7- to 8-year-olds) and fourth graders (9- to 10-year-olds), using brief text passages designed to suggest two interpretations about the cause of a target event. The results indicated that older children were significantly more likely to report two interpretations of the passages. Children in both grades reported more second interpretations when the text information was presented as a narrative rather than as an expository passage. Children’s initial interpretations generally reflected the causal information most recently encountered in the passage. q 1996 Academic Press, Inc.

Most researchers and educators would agree that text comprehension is a constructive, interpretive process. When reading or listening to a passage, we integrate the information in the text itself with prior knowledge that has been activated by the text, and we make inferences to arrive at a gist representation of what the author meant. Our inferential processing is not only shaped by our prior knowledge about the topic, but also by text features such as titles, repetition

We thank the reviewers for their detailed and helpful comments on the manuscript. We also thank the following schools for hosting the research: the Wilder and White River Elementary Schools in Hartford, Vermont, the New Boston Elementary School in New Boston, New Hampshire and the Federal Street School in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Portions of the data from Experiments 1–2 were presented at the 1991 meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, and data from Experiment 3 were presented at the 1993 meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. Address correspondence and reprint requests to Gary Bonitatibus, Department of Psychology, Keene State College, 229 Main St., Keene, NH 03431. 131 0022-0965/96 $18.00 Copyright q 1996 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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of themes, the order of mention of information, and the thematic importance of information (Ackerman, 1985, 1988). Comprehension is also an evolving process; once made, our initial inferences may need to be modified when new information is encountered later in the passage, and our interpretation of the author’s intended meaning may shift accordingly. Or, we may find new meanings in the same text from one reading to the next by emphasizing different text information or making different inferences to relate individual propositions. Given the central role of inferential processing in text comprehension, a number of researchers have begun to investigate children’s emerging ability to monitor and adjust their inferential processing appropriately when attempting to understand a text passage (Ackerman, 1992; Beal, 1990a, 1990b; Schmidt, Schmidt, & Tomalis, 1984). One important aspect of this question is whether children are able to modify an initial inference in order to reconcile earlier information in the text with new, discrepant information that is encountered later in the passage. For example, in one story, a character first carries some wet laundry to her dryer, but then hangs the laundry outside on a clothesline (Ackerman, 1988). The initial interpretation that she intended to dry the laundry in the machine must be modified in order to understand the story; a reasonable interpretation of the passage can be made by inferring that the dryer was broken, which bridges the inconsistency between the character’s initial and subsequent actions. The results of a number of studies with passages of this type indicate that second graders are more dependent than fourth graders and adults on the availability of text cues to the alternative inferences, such as titles, but that even second graders are generally able to modify their initial inferences appropriately in order to bridge the inconsistencies (Ackerman, Jackson & Sherrill, 1991; Schmidt et al., 1984). Thus, these studies suggest that second graders are not necessarily locked into an initial interpretation of a passage, but rather are capable of replacing an initial inference with an alternative in order to reconcile an inconsistency between prior and new information. A somewhat different picture is suggested by preliminary research on children’s understanding of another related aspect of interpretive processing, specifically, their ability to recognize that in some cases two valid interpretations could be made of the same text (interpretive ambiguity). For example, in a story about a smashed sand castle, the cause might be big ocean waves or a malicious little brother, with the text supporting either interpretation to one degree or another. Whereas in the case of the clothes dryer passage one initial interpretation must be replaced by another in order to resolve the discrepancy, in the case of the smashed sand castle passage both interpretations could be considered valid. Recognition of this form of interpretive uncertainty is important for several reasons: First, it may be a signal of potential comprehension failure, indicating that we may have misunderstood what the author meant and perhaps need to reread the text, or look for additional information for clarification as to which interpretation was intended

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(Markman, 1979). Second, awareness and analysis of alternative interpretations may be a path towards a deeper comprehension and appreciation of a complex text. Some works of literature involve interpretive ambiguity of this sort. Components of the text may be found that are consistent with either of two interpretations, and part of the enjoyment of the story is the consideration and evaluation of the alternatives (Heller, 1989). Third, awareness of valid alternative interpretations is important for effective writing, as the author must try to anticipate and forestall possible misinterpretations that could be made by prospective readers if the text is not sufficiently specific. Although comparably few studies have focused specifically on children’s recognition of interpretive ambiguity, there are two preliminary indications that there may be developmental differences in this area. First, although second graders have generally been found to modify inferences appropriately to resolve inconsistencies within a passage, they are more likely than older children to retain their first interpretation, and are more dependent on text cues to aid retrieval of information used to modify an initial interpretation (Ackerman, 1985, 1988; Ackerman & Jackson, 1991). Such findings suggest that younger children may exhibit a greater degree of interpretive inflexibility than older children, that is, a tendency to retain their first inferences longer than is appropriate given the text information. Second, younger children’s greater difficulty with ambiguity detection, as indicated by studies of referential communication and comprehension monitoring, also suggests that they may have difficulty recognizing two alternative interpretations within a passage. As suggested by Olson (1994), younger children are thought to be less able than older children to sustain a clear distinction between the literal meaning of the text and their assumptions about what the author meant (Beal, 1988; Beal & Flavell, 1984; Bonitatibus, 1988a, 1988b; Olson & Hildyard, 1983; Robinson, Goelman & Olson, 1983; Robinson & Whittaker, 1987). Constructing one interpretation should therefore make it more difficult for younger children to reevaluate the text and note that an alternative, equally valid interpretation could also be made (Beal & Flavell, 1984; Beal & Belgrad, 1990). Consistent with this prediction, Bell, Torrance, and Olson (1987) found developmental differences in first through fifth graders’ ability to explain why one story character misunderstood what another character wanted; the misunderstanding derived from the use of an ambiguous word by the speaker in the story (e.g., ‘‘glasses’’ could refer to drinking glasses or sunglasses). Also, Beal (1990b, Experiment 4) found that first graders were less likely than third graders to note that there were two possible causes for a target event in brief stories. These preliminary findings lend support to the possibility that there are developmental differences in children’s recognition of interpretive ambiguity, yet clear conclusions are limited because none of these studies was specifically designed to address this issue. The Ackerman and Jackson (1991) study involved the resolution of inconsistencies by changing one interpretation for another, rather than the detection of alternative valid interpretations. In Bell et al. (1987) the misunderstanding involved the interpretation of a single

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ambiguous word, rather than interpretations that depended on alternative inferences; and in Beal (1990b) children were questioned about a second possible interpretation after several other questions about the passage had been posed, possibly limiting the younger children’s ability to remember the relevant information. Thus, it is not yet clear whether younger children are able to recognize alternative interpretations when explicitly asked to do so. One goal of the present research was to address this question. A second goal of the research was to learn how the structure of the text would influence children’s interpretive processing, in particular, which of the two potential interpretations children would report first. Ackerman and his colleagues found that children’s ability to modify initial inferences with new information to resolve inconsistencies was strongly influenced by the relative accessibility of the information (Ackerman et al., 1991). Accessibility varied with text cues; in particular, the recent mention of the concept in the text and the number of sentences related to the target concept facilitated the use of the concept in an inference made to resolve an inconsistency in the passage. We attempted to address a similar issue by creating text passages in which we varied the number of sentences that appeared to support one interpretation over another, in order to learn if the most recently mentioned causes would become the basis for children’s first interpretations (Ackerman, 1988; Casteel, 1993a, 1993b). To summarize, the research was designed to examine children’s developing ability to report two interpretations of text passages and the influence of text structure on children’s interpretive processing. Three experiments were conducted with second grade (7- to 8-year-olds) and fourth grade (9- to 10year-olds) children. In each experiment children viewed brief passages in which two potential causes for a target event were implied by the text. Children were asked to report what could have caused a target event and if something else could have caused it. The events in the passages and the inferences required to relate possible causes to the events were designed to be extremely accessible, to ensure that both older and younger children could report at least one cause and that developmental differences in detecting alternative interpretations could not be attributed to the possibility that the necessary inferences were too hard for younger children (Beal, 1990b; Thompson & Myers, 1985). In the second and third experiments, children were also asked to evaluate the communicative clarity of the passages. In addition, in the third experiment, we examined the effects of facilitated inferential processing on children’s detection of interpretive ambiguity. EXPERIMENT 1 Method

Subjects Twenty-four second graders (M Å 8 years, 2 months; range from 7 years 6 months to 9 years 3 months) and 21 fourth graders (M Å 9 years, 9 months;

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range from 9 years 5 months to 10 years 11 months) were included in the experiment. The children attended a school located in a small, rural, working class New England community. In this and the subsequent experiments approximately equal numbers of boys and girls participated in each grade and almost all were white. Materials The same story passages were used in Experiments 1 – 2. Each story was five sentences long and described a target event. For example, one story described a child at the beach making a sand castle which was then smashed (target event). The target events in the stories involved physical outcomes because physical causality inferences have been shown in previous work to be very easy for preschoolers to make, therefore, they should be readily accessible to both second and fourth graders (Thompson & Myers, 1985). Examples of other target events included a boy who fell into an icy stream: did he slip on the wet rocks, or was he accidentally pushed in by a friend?; a girl found a movie video on the kitchen table: did her mother bring it home, or did her brother stop to get it after school?; a girl whose finger was hurt while gardening: was she stung by a bee or pricked by a rose thorn? Each story was prepared in four versions (an example is shown in Appendix A). In the neutral version no potential cause for the target event (e.g., smashed sand castle) was mentioned in the text. In the unbiased version, two sentences about potential causes were included (e.g., the waves were very big that day, brother was playing nearby). Neither was explicitly described as the actual cause, thus, an inference was required to relate the information to the target event (Beal, 1990b). To investigate the role of text structure on children’s interpretive processing, two additional versions were included in which an ending sentence reinforced one of the two potential interpretations. In the proximal-bias version, the ending sentence reinforced the cause mentioned immediately before the target event (e.g., big waves, brother nearby, smashed sand castle, footprints in the sand). In the distal-bias version, the ending sentence reinforced the first cause mentioned in the text (e.g., big waves, brother nearby, smashed sand castle, wet sand). For unbiased, proximal-bias, and distal-bias versions, the order in which the causes were mentioned was systematically counterbalanced; also, for proximal and distal versions, the content of the bias sentence was systematically counterbalanced. In addition, across subjects, the content of the passages (e.g., sand castle, icy stream, video, etc.) and text version (neutral, unbiased, proximal-bias, distal-bias) were counterbalanced. Each child saw eight stories, two of each of the four types. Each story was printed on a single page in large font, and the stories were collected into booklets in one of two randomly determined orders.

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Procedure Children were individually interviewed in an empty classroom or school office in a session that lasted about 20–25 min. Pretraining. Children were initially presented with a practice story involving a girl who stayed after school to help the teacher and then discovered that her snowboots, left outside the classroom, were missing. The story mentioned that other children had put on their coats and boots and gone home, and that the janitor had been cleaning in the hallway. Children were asked what could have happened to the protagonist’s snowboots. Almost all children suggested that the boots had been collected by the janitor or that another child had mistakenly taken them. The experimenter agreed that the child’s suggestion was a good possibility, pointing to the corresponding sentence in the practice story and saying, ‘‘Yes, the words right here say that the janitor was cleaning nearby/the other children put on their boots and coats.’’ The experimenter continued, ‘‘But you know, it doesn’t tell exactly what happened to Sally’s snowboots. It just says she couldn’t find them. In the story, could something else have happened?’’ Almost all children reported the second alternative and were told, ‘‘Yes, that could have happened. The words right here (point to sentence) say ‘the janitor was cleaning nearby/the other children put on their boots and coats.’ That part makes you think that the janitor/the other children could have taken them. So, the words of this story don’t really tell exactly what happened, do they?’’ In the few cases in which children did not suggest one of the alternatives in the text (e.g., ‘‘Maybe she just thought she had worn them that day but really she didn’t’’) the experimenter agreed that the child’s suggestion was a possibility but added, ‘‘The words of the story give you some ideas: listen again and see if there are some clues in the words of the story.’’ The experimenter read the story again and asked the child what else could have happened; after the child’s suggestion, the pretraining continued as above. The pretraining therefore introduced the child to the notion that the task would involve a critical appraisal of text passages, conveyed that the passages did not necessarily specify exactly what had happened and that the child’s job was to look for alternatives, and emphasized that the child should attend carefully to exactly what was written and to consider alternatives specifically suggested by the words of the passage. After the practice example, children were shown the booklet containing the test passages. They were told that the stories in the booklet did not seem to be written clearly and that other children their age found it difficult to know exactly what had happened in them. They were asked to help out the experimenter by listening to each story and reporting different things that could have happened. The text of the story remained in view at all times. Viewing the text has been shown to increase children’s attention to the literal meaning and to facilitate their evaluation of its communicative clarity, independently of children’s ability to decode the text (Bonitatibus & Flavell, 1985; Torrance & Olson, 1989).

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Test trials. The eight test stories in the booklet were then presented. The experimenter read each story aloud while pointing to each sentence as the child watched. The experimenter then asked the child what had happened to cause the target event (first interpretation). This question was worded specifically for each passage, for example, ‘‘How did her sand castle get smashed?’’, ‘‘What made him fall into the icy stream?’’, ‘‘Who brought the video home?’’, ‘‘What hurt her finger?’’, and so on. After offering one cause, the child was then asked, ‘‘Well, could it have happened another way?’’ (second interpretation). If the child could not describe one or both of the two possibilities suggested by the text, the experimenter proceeded to the next passage in the booklet. If the child offered a second interpretation, the experimenter continued, ‘‘Those are both things that could have happened in this story, aren’t they? Can you think of some way that both things could have happened in the same story? How would the story go then?’’ (integration of interpretations). The interpretation integration question was designed to extend earlier work on children’s ability to repair problematic passages. Previous studies had shown that both younger and older children who notice text problems are able to suggest an appropriate revision; however, this work had been limited to passages containing inconsistencies rather than alternative interpretations (Beal, 1990a). Results and Discussion

In this and the following experiments, preliminary analyses showed no significant effects of sex, passage, order of presentation, or experimenter, and no significant interactions involving these factors. Thus, the results described below involve analyses in which the data were collapsed over these factors. The passages had been designed to ensure that children in both grades would be equally likely to make one interpretation. To verify that this was the case, children received scores for the number of stories of each type for which they reported at least one of the two causes mentioned in the passage. In the case of the unbiased, proximal-bias and distal-bias stories, children received credit for one interpretation if they reported one of the two specific possibilities suggested by the text (e.g., waves, or brother). Causes described for the neutral stories were considered adequate if they were plausible, physically possible events. For example, suggesting that a dog ran over the sand castle was considered a legitimate interpretation, whereas saying that Martians came down from a space ship and blasted the sand castle was not. As it turned out, the nonpossible causes were extremely rare; almost all causes suggested by children were plausible, possible events that fit the constraints of the specific text being discussed (e.g., stray beachballs, large waves, family members, runaway pets). In fact, of the 90 neutral stories that were presented in the experiment (two each for 45 subjects), all but eight of the causes spontaneously suggested by children were those that were actually used in

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the biased versions. This again suggests that the inferences required to understand the passages were quite easy for children of this age. Mean scores for the number of stories on which children reported at least one interpretation may be seen in Table 1. These scores were analyzed in a grade (2) 1 text type (neutral, unbiased, proximal-bias, distal-bias) analysis of variance, with text type as a repeated factor. The results showed that children in both grades could easily make one of the two potential interpretations of the materials; performance was at ceiling. There was no effect of grade or text type, and none of the interactions was significant. Children were then given scores for the number of stories on which they identified the second interpretation, that is, if they reported the other cause specifically mentioned in the story (or, in the case of neutral stories, another plausible, physically possible cause). These scores were analyzed in a grade (2) 1 text type (4) analysis of variance, which revealed an effect of grade, F(1,43) Å 8.01, p õ .01. Fourth graders were significantly more likely to report a second interpretation than second graders. Mean scores for two interpretations are shown in Table 1. This result indicates that once the younger children constructed or generated one interpretation of a passage it was somewhat more difficult for them to see another interpretation than was the case for the older children. Because the passages’ content and the order of potential causes and biasing statements were completely counterbalanced across subjects, this effect was independent of the particular inference required to make the second interpretation. That is, some children reported first that the waves ruined the sand castle and then did not detect the brother as a possible cause, whereas other children first reported the brother as the cause and then overlooked the waves. Interestingly, however, children’s ability to note the alternatives was not affected by text structure; there was no effect of text type,and there were no significant interactions. Because the scoring criterion for the neutral stories was different than for those in which causes were specified in the text (neutral stories were scored on the basis of physical plausibility rather than match to text), we repeated the analysis with the neutral stories excluded and again found a significant developmental difference in reporting the second interpretation, F(1,43) Å 5.2, p õ .05. It should be noted however that because the causes were not independently normed they may have varied in salience; this could have affected children’s ability to note a second interpretation in some cases. We also investigated how text structure affected the salience of one interpretation over another, that is, which of the two possible interpretations children reported first. Previous research on children’s understanding of causality indicates that events that occur immediately prior to outcomes are considered the most salient causes even by very young children; also, work on children’s inference modification suggests that the most recently mentioned concepts should be most accessible (Ackerman et al., 1991; Bullock & Gelman, 1979; Kun, 1978). In our text passages, the second cause mentioned in the text would therefore be predicted

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05-16-96 01:26:11 1.37 (0.69) 1.77 (0.52) 1.00 (0.71) 1.28 (0.69)

2.00 (0.00) 2.00 (0.00)

2nd

2.00 (0.00) 2.00 (0.00)

1st

Neutral

2.00 (0.00) 2.00 (0.00)

1.96 (0.19) 2.00 (0.00)

1st

2nd

1.06 (0.74) 1.78 (0.55)

1.45 (0.70) 1.71 (0.54)

Unbiased

2.00 (0.00) 2.00 (0.00)

1.96 (0.19) 2.00 (0.00)

1st

1.06 (0.74) 1.78 (0.41)

1.29 (0.67) 1.57 (0.66)

2nd

Proximal bias

Note. Maximum possible score is two for each text type. Standard deviations are shown in parentheses.

Experiment 1 2nd grade 4th grade Experiment 2 2nd grade 4th grade

Interpretations reported

Text type

TABLE 1 Mean Scores for Number of Interpretations Reported in Experiments 1–2

2.00 (0.00) 2.00 (0.00)

1.96 (0.19) 1.90 (0.29)

1st

2nd

0.68 (0.68) 1.21 (0.77)

1.25 (0.77) 1.62 (0.57)

Distal bias

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to be most salient (the proximal cause) because it was located immediately before the target event in the passage. However, the final sentence in some of the stories emphasized either the proximal cause, or the one mentioned earlier in the passage. We recorded whether the child’s first interpretation matched the second cause mentioned in the story (the proximal cause). Children’s match scores were summed and analyzed in a grade (2) 1 text type (3) analysis of variance, with text type as a repeated factor. (Neutral stories were not included in this analysis.) The results showed no effect of grade and no significant interactions,but there was a significant effect of text type, F(2,86) Å 15.29, p õ .001. Children were more likely to report the proximal cause (listed immediately before the target event) for the unbiased (M Å 1.20) and proximal-bias stories (M Å 1.50) than for the distal-bias stories (M Å 0.66). Overall, the results suggested a recency effect in children’s text processing, with the most recent information in the passage determining the relative salience of causes and therefore the child’s interpretation of what happened in the story,even if this meant thinking back to a possibility mentioned earlier in the passage. This is consistent with Ackerman’s (Ackerman et al., 1991) retrieval model of text processing in which inferences are made as a function of the accessibility of the concept in memory, which in turn depends on cues in the text that serve to activate the information. When children reported two interpretations for a passage, they were also asked to describe how both events could have occurred within the story as an initial investigation into their revision skills in this area. Integrations were considered successful if both causes mentioned in the text were included and if there was a physically possible connection described between them. For example, a child might suggest that Cindy’s brother looked up and saw a big wave about to break, and ran over the sand castle in his effort to get away. Scores for the number of stories on which children described an integration were analyzed in a grade (2) 1 text type (4) analysis of variance. This showed only an effect of grade, F(1,43) Å 6.79, p õ .05, with second graders producing integrations on 3.08 stories, compared to a mean score of 4.57 for fourth graders (out of eight passages). To summarize the results of the first study, second graders were less likely than fourth graders to detect alternative interpretations of brief stories, although the inferences required to construct the second interpretation were quite easy for children in both grades to make in isolation. Also, the structure of the text influenced which of the two interpretations was most salient, with children’s initial interpretations most often reflecting the last cause suggested in the passage. EXPERIMENT 2

In Experiment 2, the ability to note alternative interpretations was examined in relation to children’s ability to evaluate the clarity of the text passages. Previous studies have indicated that text monitoring and comprehension monitoring may not be clearly coordinated early in development (Ackerman & Jackson, 1991).

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For example, in studies of referential communication, preschoolers may report that an ambiguous message has alternative interpretations but they often still judge that they understood exactly what the speaker meant (Beal & Flavell, 1982; Singer & Flavell, 1981). Ackerman and Jackson (1991) found that second graders were sensitive to their own uncertainty while attempting to understand the stories,but they did not evaluate the stories’ adequacy as accurately as adult subjects. Also, explicit warnings about text problems do not necessarily lead children to evaluate the adequacy of the passages accurately (August, Flavell & Clift, 1984; Beal, 1990a; Flavell, Speer, Green & August, 1981; Markman, 1979). Thus, it seemed possible that children who detected interpretive ambiguity might still judge the text to be clearly written. Method

Subjects Sixteen second graders (M Å 8 years, 2 months; range from 7 years 6 months to 8 years 10 months) and 14 fourth graders (M Å 10 years, 6 months; range from 9 years 7 months to 11 years) participated. As in the first experiment, children attended a school in a rural, working class area of New England. Procedure Pretraining was conducted as in the first experiment. After presentation of each story the child was asked a) what happened to cause the target event, b) if something else could have caused it (second interpretation), and c) if the words of the story told exactly what had caused the target event (text evaluation): ‘‘Do the words of the story (point to text) tell exactly what smashed the sand castle/made him fall in the stream/hurt her finger/who brought the video home,’’ etc. Results and Discussion

As in the first experiment, both older and younger children were easily able to make one interpretation of the stories; performance was at ceiling. Mean scores are shown in Table 1. There were no significant grade or text type effects or interactions. All but three of the causes suggested on the 60 neutral story trials were those that were used in the biased versions. Mean scores for the number of second interpretations are also indicated in Table 1. A grade (2) 1 text type (4) analysis of variance showed that second graders were again less likely than fourth graders to report two interpretations for the stories, F(1,28) Å 14.15, p õ .001. No other effects were significant. The developmental difference was again observed when data from the neutral stories were excluded from the analysis, F(1,28) Å 13.39, p õ .01. When asked if the words told exactly what had caused the target event, both older and younger children recognized that the text was not clear. This

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was indicated by a grade (2) 1 text type (4) analysis of variance on scores representing the number of stories that children incorrectly judged to tell exactly what had caused the target event. Although there was no effect of grade in this analysis, there was an effect of text type, F(3,84) Å 5.09, p õ .01. Newman–Keuls comparisons (a õ .05) indicated that the biased versions of the stories (those with an ending sentence that emphasized one interpretation) were most likely to be incorrectly judged as completely clear and explicit. Mean error scores were 0.20 for neutral stories, 0.40 for unbiased stories, and 0.65 for both the proximal- and distal-bias stories, out of two possible for each text type. Children’s proficiency in reporting that the passages did not tell what had happened may have reflected the fact that they had been explicitly warned during pretraining that the passages were not written clearly. Yet as noted above, in earlier studies such warnings alone have not always been sufficient to prompt accurate evaluation of the communicative quality of text materials. Also, the text evaluation question concerned children’s judgments about the communicative quality of the text itself, not the degree to which they themselves thought they understood what the author meant. These results are consistent with other recent studies showing that different measures of comprehension monitoring can yield different results (Ackerman & Jackson, 1991; Anderson & Beal, 1995). As in the first experiment, the effect of text structure in shaping children’s initial interpretations was investigated by noting whether the cause initially mentioned by the child matched the cause immediately before the target event. When these scores were analyzed in a grade (2) 1 text type (3) analysis of variance, there was no effect of grade and the interaction was not significant. There was an effect of text type, F(2,56) Å 8.92, p õ .001. Children typically made first the interpretation that reflected the proximal cause on the unbiased (M Å 1.60) and proximal-bias (M Å 1.42) stories, but were less likely to do so on the distal-bias stories (M Å 0.84). The results therefore replicated the findings of the first experiment. EXPERIMENT 3

Experiment 3 was conducted to provide a replication of the developmental differences in detection of interpretive ambiguity with a new set of text passages, in this case, information about animals. In addition, none of the passages in the first two experiments was clearly written, which might have led to a ‘‘no’’ response bias for the text evaluation question in the second experiment. Therefore, in Experiment 3, we included clear passages to learn if children would judge them correctly to be specific. In addition, we investigated the effects of two text manipulations that were designed to facilitate or impede children’s inferential processing, which should in turn affect their detection of the alternative interpretations. One factor was the nature of the text passage: expository or narrative. Previous studies have indicated that narrative passages foster inferential processing, as do definite forms of reference (Ackerman, 1979; McDaniel, Einstein,

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Dunay, & Cobb, 1986; Waddill, McDaniel, & Einstein, 1988). Therefore, two versions of each passage were created; in the narrative version, a proper name was used to refer to an animal character (e.g., ‘‘Betty Bora Bird’’) whereas in the expository version the same information about the animal was conveyed in a generic description (‘‘bora birds’’). Inferential processing was also manipulated by having the target event either occur or not. This manipulation was selected because comprehension of passages that involve negation is thought to be more difficult than those that do not involve negation, and it also seems to be generally difficult for children to reason about possible causes for delayed, absent, or negative outcomes (Clark & Clark, 1977; Karniol, 1980; Mendelson & Shultz, 1976; Schauble, 1990). In some versions of the passages, the alternative causes could be directly linked to the event, whereas in the remaining passages they were causally linked to the negation or absence of the outcome. For example, in one passage about the bora bird, children could infer that the bird sat on or buried her eggs in the warm sand so that they would hatch. In another version the eggs did not hatch; children had to determine that this resulted because the bird did not sit on or bury the eggs in warm sand. It was predicted that children should be less likely to detect both possible interpretations when the outcome events were described in the passage as not having occurred. Method

Subjects The experiment included second graders (M Å 7 years, 7 months; range from 6 years 4 months to 8 years, 9 months) and fourth graders (M Å 10 years; range from 9 years 2 months to 10 years 6 months), N Å 32 per grade. Children were randomly assigned to the narrative or expository text condition. Materials Eight passages about animals were prepared, based on information found in elementary school science textbooks. Examples included bees that find nectar by flowers’ sweet smell or bright colors; tetra fish that escape predators by swimming fast or hiding in rocks; banana snails that stay moist by producing slime or living in wet places, etc. Each text was prepared in a narrative form and an expository form. The same content was included in both forms; the change was accomplished by using a proper name and pronoun for the narrative version, to personalize the animal as a story character. For example, the descriptive passage about the bora bird and how it hatched its eggs was changed to a passage about Betty Bora Bird and how she hatched her eggs. Each text had a target outcome that either occurred or did not. Two potential causes for the event were mentioned (comparable to the unbiased stories in the previous experiments). There was also a neutral version and a clear version of each text; in the neutral version, no causes were suggested,

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and in the clear version a cause was explicitly described (e.g., ‘‘The bora bird’s eggs hatch because they are buried in warm sand.’’). Outcome version (occurrence, nonoccurrence), text type (two causes, neutral, clear), and order of mention of the causes were counterbalanced across subjects. Each child saw eight passages, all either narrative or expository: Two clear (occurrence, nonoccurrence), two neutral (occurrence, nonoccurrence), and four two-cause (two occurrence, two nonoccurrence). As in the earlier studies, passage content (type of animal), text structure (clear, neutral, two-cause), and format (expository, narrative) were systematically counterbalanced across subjects; thus, for example, half the children saw the passage about the bora bird whereas the remaining children saw the passage about Betty Bora Bird. The texts were assembled into booklets in one of two randomly determined orders. Procedure Half of the children were told ‘‘I have some friends who are writing a storybook for children your age.’’ The other children were told ‘‘I have some friends who are writing a science textbook for children your age.’’ They were then told that they would be asked to review some stories or passages being prepared for the book. As in the previous experiments, children were provided with a practice example (about a squirrel who had lots of food to eat during a long, cold winter; causes suggested in the text were burying food in the ground or storing it in hollow trees). Children were again given pretraining in reporting both possible causes of the target outcome mentioned in the passage. The experimenter read each passage aloud while the child followed along; the text remained in view during questioning. After each passage was presented, children were asked what caused the target event (e.g., ‘‘Why did the bora bird’s eggs hatch?’’ or ‘‘Why did Betty’s eggs hatch?’’ for positive events; ‘‘Why didn’t the bora bird’s eggs hatch?’’ or ‘‘Why didn’t Betty’s eggs hatch?’’ for negated events. Children were then asked if something else could have caused the target event or its failure to occur (‘‘Could there have been another reason...?’’). They were then asked a text evaluation question paralleling that used in Experiment 2 (e.g., ‘‘Do the words of the story/paragraph (point to text) tell exactly why the eggs/Betty’s eggs hatched/didn’t hatch?’’) Results and Discussion

As in previous experiments all children were at ceiling in identifying one cause for the target outcome. There were no effects of grade, condition, or text type, and no significant interactions. Mean scores may be seen in Table 2. Thus, the new passages were comparable to those used in Experiments 1– 2 in that they were easily understood by both older and younger children, even though they involved less familiar content and causal information. Children were scored on their ability to detect the second cause mentioned

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FINDING NEW MEANINGS TABLE 2 Mean Scores for Number of Interpretations Reported for Two-Cause Passages in Experiment 3 Text type Event occurs Interpretations reported: Narrative passage 2nd grade 4th grade Expository passage 2nd grade 4th grade

Event does not occur

1st

2nd

1st

2nd

1.93 (0.25) 1.93 (0.25)

1.31 (0.70) 1.50 (0.63)

1.87 (0.34) 1.68 (0.60)

1.00 (0.63) 1.50 (0.73)

1.93 (0.25) 1.76 (0.56)

0.87 (0.88) 1.41 (0.79)

1.75 (0.57) 1.88 (0.33)

0.56 (0.62) 1.05 (0.89)

Note. Maximum score is two possible for each text type. Standard deviations are shown in parentheses.

in the two-cause passages. These scores were summed and analyzed in a grade (2) 1 passage type (narrative, expository) 1 outcome type (occurrence, nonoccurrence) analysis of variance, with outcome type as a repeated factor. The results showed an effect of grade, F(1,61) Å 8.36, p õ .01. As may be seen in Table 2, fourth graders were more likely than second graders to report the alternative interpretation, thus replicating the developmental difference observed in Experiments 1–2 with a new set of passages. There was also a significant effect of passage type, F(1,61) Å 5.58, p õ .05. Children who saw narrative versions were more likely to report the second interpretation than children who saw expository versions. Finally, there was an effect of outcome type, F(1,61) Å 4.86, p õ .05. As predicted, children’s performance was lower when they had to report alternative interpretations for why an event might not have occurred. Children were generally able to see one potential reason why the event did not happen, but found it especially difficult to notice the second possibility in this case. As may be seen in Table 2, fourth graders in the narrative condition appeared to be less affected by the negative outcomes than those in the expository condition. However, the three-way interaction between grade, passage type, and outcome was not significant, F(1,61) Å 0.63, N.S. It is possible that the small number of subjects (16 in each grade and passage type condition) meant that we did not have the power to detect an effect; conclusions concerning this factor are therefore tentative. In response to the text evaluation question, both older and younger children were quite accurate. Children correctly judged 76% of the clear items to be clear; they also correctly judged 84% of the no-cause items and 78% of the two-cause items to be unclear. The text evaluation results of Experiment 2 were therefore replicated with a new set of materials; also, it appears that

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children’s earlier good performance on the text evaluation questions was not due to a negative response bias. GENERAL DISCUSSION

The present studies were designed to address children’s emerging ability to detect interpretive ambiguity, the recognition that a text could be interpreted in more than one way. The results of three experiments indicated that second graders were less likely than fourth graders to report alternative interpretations of brief passages. The developmental difference was not large in absolute terms, but it was observed consistently in three experiments involving two different sets of text materials, including quite familiar (Experiments 1–2) and less familiar passage content (Experiment 3). Converging evidence is found in a study by Casteel (1993b) who recently reported a similar developmental pattern with a task involving longer text passages (13 sentences versus 5). Also, the effect was observed even though the passages used in the first two experiments were designed to be very easy to understand, and involved physical causality inferences that are known to be well within the capacities of the younger children. In fact, performance was at ceiling for first interpretations, and children themselves almost always spontaneously generated the target causes on neutral story trials. Thus, although the younger children could easily make the necessary inferences and were prompted and pretrained to look for alternative interpretations, they were less likely to do so than fourth graders. This result converges with earlier work showing that second graders are less likely than fourth graders to modify an initial interpretation in order to resolve inconsistencies between earlier and later material within a passage (Ackerman, 1985, 1988; Ackerman & Jackson, 1991). Children’s detection of interpretive ambiguity was also shown in the third experiment to vary with the difficulty of the inferential processing necessary to understand the passage. When the target inferences were more difficult to make because they required negation, children found it relatively difficult to recognize the alternative interpretations. Conversely, when inferential processing was facilitated by the presentation of the information in a narrative format, children were more likely to note the alternative interpretations. This is consistent with previous work indicating that narratives and definite terms of reference (such as proper names) foster inferential processing in children (Ackerman, 1979) and adults (McDaniel et al., 1986; Waddill et al., 1988). One limitation of the narrative–expository manipulation was that the stories were not classically structured narratives containing goals, obstacles, plans, and resolutions; the two versions differed only in the personalization of the animal character with a proper name. On the other hand, the narrative and expository versions of our passages contained the same content, which had not previously been done in investigations of the effects of different text formats (McDaniel et al., 1986; Waddill et al., 1988). In addition to the findings regarding detection of interpretive ambiguity,

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the results extend previous work in two other areas. First, the results reinforce Ackerman and Jackson’s (1991) claim that children’s monitoring of their own comprehension should be distinguished from their monitoring of text clarity and quality. Consistent with this point, children in the present studies generally reported correctly that the words of the text did not specify exactly what had happened. This finding held for both second and fourth graders, and for narrative passages (Experiments 2–3) as well as expository descriptions (Experiment 3). Also, when the passages were clear children rated them as explicit, and when biasing statements that emphasized one of the interpretations were present, children made intermediate judgments of the communicative adequacy of the passages. Thus, in contrast to earlier work showing that children of this age often overestimate their own comprehension, the present studies indicate that they were generally accurate in their assessments of the communicative quality of the passages. The results also converge with the findings of earlier studies in showing a recency effect in children’s interpretive processing, including longer narratives (cf. Casteel, 1993b) and stories containing anomalous information (cf. Ackerman et al., 1991; Schmidt et al., 1984). In the present studies, children’s first interpretation strongly tended to reflect the most recently mentioned concept. For most passage versions, this was the information immediately preceding the target event; for biased versions, this information was contained in the final sentence and reactivated information encountered earlier in the passage (cf. van den Broek, 1990). Taken together, these findings reinforce the conclusion that it is the concepts that are made most accessible by the structure of the text that become the basis of children’s first interpretations of a passage (Ackerman et al., 1991; Ackerman & McGraw, 1991). One important question for future work will be to establish the precise nature of younger children’s difficulty in detecting and reporting interpretive uncertainty and ambiguity in text passages. One possibility is that second graders’ difficulty in this area reflects monitoring difficulties resulting from a confusion of literal and intended meaning (Bonitatibus, 1988a; Beal & Flavell, 1984). The present findings are generally consistent with this view, in that second graders were less likely to realize that two legitimate interpretations could be made of the same passage. Yet this view would predict that younger children should have found it particularly difficult to note the alternative interpretation on the biased passages, those in which one of the possibilities is more heavily reinforced by the text. However, across the three experiments, there was no interaction between text type and grade. Thus, monitoring difficulties may contribute to the developmental findings, but cannot as yet entirely account for them. Another possibility is that younger children may have been less likely to shift from an initial interpretation because of memory and processing limitations (Ackerman, 1985). Older children were no doubt able to decode the text more easily than younger children and may therefore have had an advantage in the task. On the other hand, every effort was made to make the task easy for younger

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children. The passages were extremely brief and were read aloud to the children; the inferences required were simple; and the younger children did on many occasions report two causes for a passage, suggesting that the task was generally within their abilities. In addition, children had been explicitly directed and pretrained to monitor the passages for two possible causes. Thus, it seems that processing limitations cannot completely account for these results. In summary, the results of these experiments indicate that younger children were less able to recognize alternative interpretations than older children, but they were surprisingly sensitive to the lack of textual clarity in the ambiguous passages. Children of both ages were influenced by text structure and genre. Overall, the results add to our understanding of children’s appreciation of the relation between text and comprehension. Additional investigations will be necessary to learn precisely why younger children are less likely to detect interpretive ambiguity. APPENDIX A Example of Story Used in Experiments 1–2

Neutral Version Cindy was at the beach. It was a sunny day. She made a sand castle. The sand castle got smashed. (target event) Her father helped her make another one. Unbiased Version Cindy was at the beach. She made a sand castle. The waves were big that day. (distal cause) Her brother was playing nearby. (proximal cause) Her sand castle got smashed. (target event) Proximal-bias Version Cindy was making a sand castle at the beach. The waves were big that day. (distal cause) Her brother was playing nearby. (proximal cause) Her sand castle got smashed. (target event) There were footprints on the sand. (proximal bias) Distal-bias Version Cindy was making a sand castle at the beach. The waves were big that day. (distal cause) Her brother was playing nearby. (proximal cause) Her sand castle got smashed. (target event) The sand was all wet. (distal bias)

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