Representations of contemporaneous events of a story for novice Readers

Barbara Arfé

Tania Di Mascio

Rosella Gennari

pp. 589-605

in: Lorenzo Magnani, Walter Carnielli, Claudio Pizzi (eds), Model-based reasoning in science and technology, Berlin, Springer, 2010

Abstract

We are working on a story comprehension tool for novice readers, among whom are 6-8 olds in Italy. The tool also asks them to reason on the temporal dimension of stories. In the design of the tool, we stumbled on the following question: how we can render qualitative temporal relations of a story with a visual representation that is conceptually adequate to novice readers. The question triggered the trans-disciplinary work reported on in this paper, written by a cognitive psychologist, an engineer and a logician. The work primarily consists in an experimental study with 6-8 old novice readers, first and second graders of an Italian primary school. We read them a story, and then asked them to visually represent certain contemporaneous relations of the story. The results of the experiment shed light on the variety of strategies that such children employ. The results also triggered two novel experimental studies that are reported on in the conclusion to this paper.