| The primary purpose of the study was to explore developmental differences in the structure of children's narrative compositions. Two secondary goals were to investigate the effect of altering the task's processing demand on story structures and to compare the pattern of development in the narrative domain to that found in the domain of scientific reasoning.; Eighty four-to-ten-year-olds of average ability were asked to tell a story. A structural analysis revealed an age related developmental progression which was then interpreted within the framework of Neo-Piagetian theory (Case, 1985). As the theory predicts, a major qualitative shift was observed at six years and more minor quantitative changes at eight and ten years. These were hypothesized to be regulated by growth in working memory. To test the correspondance between story structure and working memory capacity, the processing demands of the tasks were varied. First, the number of structural components requiring attention was increased so that the task's M-demand was one level beyond that hypothesized for the age group. Second, by partioning the tasks into problem and resolution components, M-demands were readjusted to correspond to the hypothesized capacity. As predicted, children were successful on tasks which matched their hypothesized working memory capacities but failed at more advanced levels.; Next, a structural increase was effected in the narratives of a subset of six-year-olds by building a "conceptual bridge" from their spontaneous level of performance to the next level in the developmental hierarchy, via a series of instructional procedures. To complete the investigation of the effect of a task's working memory demand on production, a qualitative increase was effected in the general structure of four-year-olds' stories by reducing the M-demand of composing from that of a generation task which required categorical thinking to that of a recall task which required only relational thinking.; Finally, the structural pattern observed in children's narrative composition was compared to that observed in the balance beam task. As predicted, group scores obtained on one task were indistinguishable from those obtained on the other.; The results of the study suggest that: (1) narrative structures are robust developmental phenomena, (2) working memory requirements of story tasks can be altered, thereby rendering them passable to children who possess an equivalent capacity, and (3) because of the similarity in the performance of each age group across different content domains, a horizontal, as well as a vertical structure is evident in development. |
