Multi-level mental representations of written, auditory, and audiovisual text in children and adults

Abstract

We examined whether the comprehension of narrative texts differed between auditory, audiovisual, and written text presentations in a sample of 8- and 10-year-olds and adults. Based on multi-level theories of text comprehension that assume text comprehension to involve at least three levels of mental representation, we applied a sentence recognition task that enabled the separate assessment of the memory of the text surface, text base, and the situation model. Results indicate that 8-year-olds benefit from audiovisual and auditory text presentations in comparison with written text presentations in terms of their memory of situation model information. For 10-year-olds and adults, their text comprehension did not differ between audiovisual, auditory, and written text presentations. Additionally, the mode of text presentation had no effect on the memory of text surface and text base information.

Children’s surface, textbase, and situation model representations of written and illustrated written narrative text

“…A power analysis conducted via G*Power (Version 3.1.9.2, Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007) indicated that with this sample size, a true effect size of η 2 = .020 would be detected with a likelihood of more than 90% (i.e., β < .10). This effect size is remarkably below the effect sizes associated with the significant results obtained in earlier sentence recognition studies, which ranged between η 2 = .040 and η 2 = .092 (Seger et al, 2019, Wannagat et al, 2017, 2018.…”

“…If the situation model could be directly obtained from a picture surface representation, semantic processing might become less relevant to this objective and might therefore be neglected. This effect was found in one of our earlier studies with auditory stories (Wannagat et al, 2018), but not in others (Seger et al, 2019;Wannagat et al, 2017). In addition, new information obtained from an illustration could alter textbase representations via model inspection (Schnotz & Bannert, 2003).…”

“…Based on the above, we examined whether illustrations would make a difference in elementary school students' comprehension of auditory narrative text (Seger, Wannagat, & Nieding, 2019;Wannagat, Waizenegger, & Nieding, 2017;Wannagat, Waizenegger, Hauf, & Nieding, 2018). Wannagat et al (2018) asked their 7, 9 and 11 year-old participants to listen to stories that comprised six sentences each before they completed a sentence recognition task.…”

“…More specifically, we investigated how each level of representation according to the tripartite model (text surface, textbase, and situation model) would be affected (Van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983;Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). To obtain separate measures for each level, we employed a sentence recognition task similar to the one introduced by Schmalhofer and Glavanov (1986) and used in several later experiments (Fletcher & Chrysler, 1990;Nieding, 2006;Seger et al, 2019;Wannagat et al, 2017Wannagat et al, , 2018. The stories in our study reflected possible daily-life situations of school children in Western countries.…”

Validation of picture story book “Tubuhku Berharga” as sexual education media for preschoolers

“…Therefore, specific educational tools for promoting healthy sexuality and personal safety should be developed to help parents and teachers communicate such awkward topics as this. Good educational tools should be culturally acceptable and cognitively appropriate for users [24]. According to Piaget's cognitive theory, preschoolers are in the pre-operational cognitive phase, characterized by the ability of children to represent the world with words, images, and drawings [20].…”