Narrative Comprehension Skills in 5-Year-Old Children: Correlational Analysis and Comprehender Profiles

ABSTRACT

This study was designed to examine whether a variety of cognitive and linguistic factors theoretically considered to be predictive of reading comprehension skills in elementary school children were also predictive of listening comprehension skills in 131 five-year-old children. The results showed that the predictors of young children's listening comprehension performance are indeed similar to those identified in the literature as predictive of reading comprehension performance. The involvement of sentence comprehension skills, updating capacities, vocabulary, and syntactic and morphological knowledge was therefore confirmed in young children. Furthermore, a cluster analysis provided evidence of early profiles of comprehenders who differed in their ability to respond to either literal or inferential questions in a comprehension test. The skills that make it possible to distinguish between these profiles are identified.

Keywords:

• inferential comprehension
• literal comprehension
• updating capacities
• young children's narrative comprehension skills

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The authors would like to thank the staff and pupils from all schools who participated in this study.