Event-indexing Across Development

When reading narratives, adults monitor specific dimensions specified by the Event-Indexing Model: Time, space, characters, goals, and causation. Shifts in any of these dimensions, such as an hour passing between events, affect both moment-by-moment reading and also memory organization. The developmental literature converges on the types of processes that children engage in during comprehension, and suggests that children also develop in their understandings of time, space, characters, goals, and causation. However, to understand the properties and usage of a dimension does not necessarily mean that children monitor those dimensions during reading or that those dimensions affect memory organization. The first goal of this study is to identify whether dimension information affects memory organization for narratives in children versus adults. The second goal is to assess whether children monitor narrative dimensions during moment-by-moment reading. The third goal is to assess what underlying processes may affect the propensity to monitor and organize memory using the narrative dimensions. The results of these studies may suggest that dimension information plays a role in memory organization in middle school children. However, children do not monitor these dimensions during moment-by-moment reading in the same manner as adults. The results are discussed in terms of developmental and discourse comprehension research.