Cain, K. and Barnes, M. A. and Bryant, P. E. and Oakhill, J. V. (2001) Comprehension skill, inference making ability and their relation to knowledge. Memory and Cognition, 29 (6). pp. 850-859. ISSN 0090-502X
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
In this study we investigated the relation between young children's comprehension skill and inferencemaking ability using a procedure that controlled individual differences in general knowledge (Barnes & Dennis, 1998; Barnes, Dennis, & Haefele-Kalvaitis, 1996). A multiepisode story was read to the children, and their ability to make two types of inference was assessed: coherence inferences, which were essential for adequate comprehension of the text, and elaborative inferences, which enhanced the text representation but which were not crucial to understanding. There was a strong relation between comprehension skill and inference-making ability even when knowledge was equally available to all participants. Subsidiary analyses of the source of inference failures revealed different underlying sources of difficulty for good and poor comprehenders.