Shallow and Deep Phases of Comprehension of Discourse by Children

Abstract

Children listened to stories which contained two kinds of anomalies. One type of anomaly was produced by violating semantic restrictions (violation of sentence), and the other anomaly was based on conflicting propositions at two points in a story (violation of discourse). The capacity to detect violations of relations within sentences developed more rapidly than the capacity to detect violations of relations within discourse. The research gives an estimate of the child's developing capacity to integrate and store the structure of stories.