First, second, and fourth graders listened to stories containing an inconsistent goal and outcome. Children provided a causal inference for the inconsistency, and attributed the inference to themselves or the story. Children's attributions were related to whether the story contained causal information linking the inconsistent events. (BC)

Examined young children's interpretations of the meanings of indirect speech acts (e.g. it's 10 o'clock) in paragraphs of a contextual type biasing a literal interpretation (time of day) or an extraliteral interpretation (time to prepare for bed). Memory for these meanings was also assessed. (Author/JMB)

When 54 second graders, 54 fifth graders, and 54 college students listened to stories that varied in extent of discontinuity, even the second graders showed an ability to detect discontinuity. Sensitivity varied with extent and location of discontinuity, and with variations in instructions and titles of stories. Verbal reports may underestimate…

Presents five experiments that examine the ability of first graders, fourth graders, and adults to make causal inferences that explain how an unexpected and inconsistent "outcome" follows from an initial premise in a story. Results indicate that referential and causal coherence are empirically separable and should be distinguished…

This experiment assessed interactions between encoding and retrieval strategies in recall. Three levels of encoding conditions (random, blocked,sort) and three types of retrieval conditions (free, cued, constrained) were examined at three age levels (6, 10, and 18 years). (CM)

Describes four experiments that examined the ability of second- and fifth-grade children and college adults to use "extra-list" cues to retrieve episodic information from memory. Shows that effective cue use varied with both the "match" of cue and event classification, and with the associative structure of permanent memory.…

Results of five studies suggest that the availability of an object concept in sentences that preceded an unexpected story outcome was a critical determinant of the occurrence of an object inference. The thematic prominence of the object influences the use of the object in an inference. (RH)

Children and adults listened to stories containing an early goal sentence and a later inconsistent outcome. Later object inferences varied with context sentence and title for all ages. Results established that the effects involved maintenance of concept accessibility and that early concept prominence was critical. (BC)

Children often confuse what is said and what is meant in referential communication. Four experiments sought to determine exactly what is confused by children through the use of stories containing informative, contextually informative, and ambiguous utterances. Children tended to be insensitive to utterance ambiguity, not understanding the variable…

Examines children's ability to make both logical and pragmatic presuppositional inferences and to discriminate between the two as a function of contextual information. Five- and eight-year-old children served as subjects. (BD)

Analyzes results of four experiments using noun category and thematic stimuli and suggests that the associative structures of memory help constrain and mediate retrieval search for stimulus information. Also, that these structures as well as representations of the stimulus events in memory seem to differ for thematic and category events, and for…

Four experiments involving kindergarten, second grade, and college students revealed that even kindergarten children used statement information effectively in interpreting ambiguous utterances. All three groups had difficulty using status information. (RH)

Five experiments were used to determine whether and why second graders, fourth graders, and college students differ in modifying causal inferences about a surprising event in a story. Illustrated how encoding and retrieval factors contribute to inference modification. Results showed small developmental increases in inference modification in…

Developmental differences in the relative salience of features in concept representations in semantic memory and their contributions to differences in cued recall were examined in two experiments. Subjects were second graders, fifth graders, and college students. Results showed that recall varied with feature salience, with salience greatest for…

Describes four experiments to show that the effects of item-specific and relational encoding emphasis on recall vary with the retrieval context for both young children and adults. (HOD)