Researchers Uncover Specific Aspects of Story Comprehension in Young Children
For the first time, psycholinguists from the HSE Centre for Language and Brain, in collaboration with colleagues from the USA and Germany, recorded eye movements during a test to assess narrative skills in young children and adults. The researchers found that story comprehension depends on plot structure, and that children aged five to six tend to struggle with questions about protagonists' internal states. The study findings have been published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
The ability to perceive and produce coherent stories, also known as narrative skills, marks an important stage in the development of children's language and cognitive functions. Research shows that story comprehension develops in several stages, progressing from the simple perception of event sequences to the ability to interpret protagonists' actions and internal states, such as their thoughts, emotions, and intentions.
Specialised tests are employed to assess narrative skills. One of the most widely used tools for evaluating the narrative abilities of multilingual children is the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). It includes four animal stories—Cat, Dog, Baby Goats, and Baby Birds—each told through a sequence of six pictures. The child's task is to produce a story based on pictures and answer ten questions about each story. The questions address the motives behind the protagonists' actions (such as ‘Why did the dog jump up the tree?’) as well as their internal states (eg ‘How does the dog feel?’)
Although the stories are similar in structural and visual complexity, some studies, in particular, those by researchers at Uppsala University—have shown that the Cat and Dog stories (Figure 1) may be easier for children to process than the Baby Goats and Baby Birds stories (Figure 2). One possible explanation is that children may find it particularly challenging to answer questions about the internal states of the story's protagonists, compared to questions about their motivations and goals. In a new study, researchers from the Centre for Language and Brain at HSE University, in collaboration with colleagues from the USA and Germany, tested this hypothesis and also investigated whether visual cues would make it easier for children to respond to questions about the protagonists' internal states.
The researchers conducted two experiments: one with 53 children aged five and six as the experimental group, and another with 20 young adults as the control group. Participants viewed the stories on a computer screen and answered questions about the protagonists' motives and internal states. In some cases, visual cues were provided, such as a circle drawn around a protagonist to attract attention to their facial expression. During the experiment, eye-tracking technology was used to record participants' eye movements, helping identify which elements of the story took them longer to process. The authors analysed the accuracy of responses to comprehension questions based on the story, the type of question, and the presence of a visual cue.
Although adults generally performed better on the test than children, the Baby Birds and Baby Goats stories were more difficult for all participants to comprehend compared to the Cat and Dog stories. This may be due to the number of protagonists and the plot structure: both the Cat and Dog stories feature fewer protagonists, with the pictures more clearly indicating their motives—eg the dog is hungry and wants to grab sausages from the boy’s bag. In contrast, the Baby Goats and Baby Birds stories involve more protagonists, whose motives may be less obvious, such as why the dog chases the cat away. In general, children performed worse on questions about the protagonists' internal states—for instance, how the dog felt when the mouse ran away in Picture 1—compared to questions about their goals, such as what they intended to do and why, like why the dog grabbed the sausages. Visual cues, while they helped draw attention to the details of the stories, did not improve the children’s ability to interpret the protagonists' emotions.
The study contributes to understanding the mechanisms underlying story perception in children and may be useful in developing new diagnostic methods for language disorders.
Vladislava Staroverova
'Our findings suggest that at the age of five or six, children lack sufficient cognitive experience to assess the internal states of protagonists in the pictures and find it more challenging to interpret the protagonists' internal world than their motives for actions. This knowledge can contribute to the development of programmes aimed at enhancing language skills and emotional intelligence,' explains Vladislava Staroverova, Junior Research Fellow at the Centre for Language and Brain and co-author of the study.
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