Pooley, Nicola and Nash, Hannah and Cain, Kate (2008) Making links: how different types of connective influence memory and representation of meaning. In: 2008 British Psychological Society Developmental Section Annual Conference, 2008-09-012008-09-03.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Interclausal connectives such as ‘before,’ ‘although,’ and ‘because’ play an important role in reading: they signal the relations between segments of text and indicate how to integrate clauses and sentences. We report two experiments (cued and free recall) to investigate whether different types of connective (temporal, causal, adversative) aid 7-8 and 9-10 year-olds’ memory for sentences and affect how they represent sentence meaning. For both age groups, memory for sentences was improved when the clauses were connected by a meaningful connective that explicitly signalled the relation between them. The type of connective influenced how meaning was represented. Clearly, young readers can take advantage of the linguistic and pragmatic function of these cohesive devices.