Abstract
ABSTRACT The present study was conducted to investigate developmental changes in children's ability to understand and retell a story, and to compare children from working and middle class backgrounds in terms of these abilities. It was hypothesized that i) middle class and older children focus on important information from a story and abstract the important plot components more often, refer, to causal relations between events more often and more explicitly, and express temporal relations beetween events more explicitly than working class and younger children; ii) older children recall more internal responses than younger children. The sample consisted of 25 middle class and 26 working class children, 32 of whom were five and 19 seven years of age. A book presenting a story both verbally and pictorially was used. The child was asked to listen to the story read by experimenter and asked to retell it as best as s/he could do. After the child, retold the story, s/he was asked 13 information questions about the story. Both the narratives retold by children and the answers given to the questions were audiorecorded, transcribed and analyzed. 11Five different scores (plot-structure score, causal- relations score, temporal-connective score, internal-event score and comprehension score) were calculated. Five ANOVA's were conducted in terms of these scores. Findings indicated both age and class effects: 1) working class children focused on and abstracted more of the important plot components, more often than did working class children, 2) older children were more successful in abstraction of the important plot components than younger children, 3) children from the middle class explicitly expressed causal and temporal relations between events more often than children from the working class, 4) with increasing age children explicitly expressed causal and temporal relations between events more often; 5) middle class children were more successful in displaying their comprehension of the story than working class children with the open-ended question method just as with the free-recall method; 6) similar to the free-recall method, with the open- ended question method older children revealed a higher level comprehension of the story than the younger children. m
