Sequential reasoning and listening text comprehension in preschool children

Abstract

Both sequential reasoning skills and listening text comprehension are complex abilities that have their major development stages during the preschool period. Theoretically, an association between these skills could have its origins in the script construct: the knowledge of how events develop in real life could lead to a better comprehension of temporal and causal relationships. This study addressed the existence of a specific association between children's performance on a listening comprehension test and their performance on a picture arrangement task that was specifically developed for this project. The participants were 110 preschool children ranging in age from 3 to 6 years. The results show that children's listening text comprehension ability is mainly explained by their lexical comprehension, but at 3 years of age, their competence in correctly arranging events in a sequential order plays a significant role in explaining children's comprehension of textual information.

Keywords:

• Sequential reasoning
• Listening text comprehension
• Preschool-age children
• Cognitive flexibility

Acknowledgements

Research reported in this paper was supported by a grant from the Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Università e della Ricerca (PRIN2008 n 2008W9N2LC).