How children understand stories : a developmental analysis

This paper is devoted to the presentation of a story grammar approach to comprehension.The development of a grammar represents an attempt to describe the higher order cognitive structures which are used to encode, represent, and retrieve information from stories such as folktales or fables.These structures, defined as a set of rewrite rules, specify the types of information which should occur in stories and the types of logical relations which should connect story components.They guide a listener or reader in determining when information, critical to the cohesiveness of a story, has been omitted from a text or when the logical organization of a story has deviated from the expected sequence of events.Predictions about story memory have been derived from the story grammar and tested in several different studies on story memory.The results of these studies have shown the validity of using a story grammar approach to comprehension.However, some of the results can not readily be explained by the rules included in the current grammars.A discussion of these contradictions and future developments necessary for a more comprehensive view of understanding are provided in the conclusion of the paper.