When Do Young Children Make Inferences from Prose?

• Published in: Child development Vol. 51; no. 3; pp. 906 - 908
• Main Authors: Danner, Fred W., Mathews, Samuel R.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chicago, etc University of Chicago Press 01-09-1980; University of Chicago Press for the Society for Research in Child Development, etc
• Subjects: Brief Reports; Child development; Inference; Memory; Sentences
• ISSN: 0009-3920; 1467-8624
• DOI: 10.2307/1129483

The present study was an attempt to determine whether young children generate inferences while they read or only later in response to tasks which require inferences. Children from grades 2 and 6 read passages, each of which contained 2 premise statements which could be combined to form a simple transitive inference. Immediately after the presentation of each passage, the children were asked to read and rapidly verify the truth value of statements based on information presented in individual sentences, or on information which could be inferred from a combination of 2 sentences. 2 indices of the timing of inference making were used-1 based upon the position of premise statements in the passages and the other based upon the probability of correctly verifying inferences as a function of accuracy on the component premises. These measures indicated that children from both grades generated inferences while they were reading.