The current study examined if the narrative comprehension deficits that children with ADHD exhibit during childhood and adolescence continue in college students as a function of ADHD symptoms, and if a relationship existed between ADHD symptoms and self-efficacy. Children and adolescence with ADHD have difficulties in several areas of narrative comprehension, including maintaining goal structure, distinguishing important events from unimportant events, and making causal connections. If these deficits persist there also may be a relationship between ADHD symptoms and self-efficacy. Higher levels of ADHD symptomatology were associated with difficulties recalling story events in the college population. Some findings differed from the patterns observed for children and adolescents. College students with higher symptoms of ADHD recalled fewer events in the Growing Pains recall. However, unlike children and adolescents, college students with higher symptoms of ADHD did not recall fewer of the Growing Pains important events or causally connected events. The pattern of findings for the fables is consistent with that seen in research studying children with symptoms of ADHD. These deficits may lead to a serious deficit in academic outcomes within this population.

Master of Science / Department of Psychological Sciences / Lester Loschky / Film is a ubiquitous medium. However, the process by which we comprehend film narratives is not well understood. Reading research has shown a strong connection between eye-movements and comprehension. In four experiments we tested whether the eye-movement and comprehension relationship held for films. This was done by manipulating viewer comprehension by starting participants at different points in a film, and then tracking their eyes. Overall, the manipulation created large differences in comprehension, but only found small difference in eye-movements. In a condition of the final experiment, a task manipulation was designed to prioritize different stimulus features. This task manipulation created large differences in eye-movements when compared to participants freely viewing the clip. These results indicate that with the implicit task of narrative comprehension, top-down comprehension processes have little effect on eye-movements. To allow for strong, volitional top-down control of eye-movements in film, task manipulations need to make features that are important to comprehension irrelevant to the task.

A growing body of work suggests that narrative comprehension involves the simulation of the events and actions described in a narrative (e.g., Barsalou, 2008; Matlock, 2004). Preliterate children’s ability to simulate a narrative character’s movements is explored here in three studies. Children’s simulations of a character’s movements were found to be constrained by their expectation of the duration of the described activities (i.e., walking vs. driving) and by their expectations about the motivating influence of certain psychological factors (i.e., character being eager or not eager to get to a location). Using a novel methodology these findings reveal an ability among preliterate children to create impressively rich and dynamic mental representations of narrative events and address. The implications of the present investigation speak to the larger issue of how human minds comprehend narratives and represent narrative events.

A growing body of work suggests that narrative comprehension involves the simulation of the events and actions described in a narrative (e.g., Barsalou, 2008; Matlock, 2004). Preliterate children’s ability to simulate a narrative character’s movements is explored here in three studies. Children’s simulations of a character’s movements were found to be constrained by their expectation of the duration of the described activities (i.e., walking vs. driving) and by their expectations about the motivating influence of certain psychological factors (i.e., character being eager or not eager to get to a location). Using a novel methodology these findings reveal an ability among preliterate children to create impressively rich and dynamic mental representations of narrative events and address. The implications of the present investigation speak to the larger issue of how human minds comprehend narratives and represent narrative events.

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Det saknas logopediskt bedömningsmaterial normerat för flerspråkiga barn, och kunskapen om dessa barns typiska tal- och språkutveckling är begränsad hos logopeder i Sverige. Detta leder till över- och underdiagnostisering av språkstörning. Denna studie syftar till att undersöka svensk-engelsktalande barns narrativer (berättelser). Dessa analyseras kvantitativt och kvalitativt, både makrostrukturellt (story grammar) och mikrostrukturellt (lingvistiska mått). Även narrativ förståelse undersöks och jämförs med produktion. Studiens deltagare är 16 simultant flerspråkiga svensk-engelsktalande barn i åldern 6-7 år, som går i förskoleklass eller i första klass. Narrativerna eliciteras med hjälp av två bildsekvenser ur ett bedömningsmaterial framtaget av en forskningsgrupp inom COST Action IS0804. Bedömningsmaterialet innehåller även förståelsefrågor till bildsekvenserna, och bakgrundsfrågor för vårdnadshavare att fylla i. Resultaten visar inga skillnader i makrostruktur mellan svenska och engelska, vilket tyder på att narrativ förmåga inte nödvändigtvis är språkbunden. Jämförelser mellan förståelse och produktion av utvalda story grammar-komponenter visar dock en tydlig skillnad. Förståelsen för en karaktärs mål (story grammar-komponenten goal), vad karaktären vill uppnå, är etablerad hos de flesta deltagarna trots att produktionen av goal är begränsad. Till skillnad från makrostrukturen, skiljer sig mikrostrukturen åt i narrativerna. De engelska narrativerna är både längre och mer komplexa än de svenska. Skillnaderna mellan barn i förskoleklass och i första klass är dessutom stor, både makro- och mikrostrukturellt. Detta tyder på att mycket händer i barns språkliga och narrativa utveckling i tidig skolålder. Tvärspråkligt inflytande förefaller vara en naturlig del av den typiska språkutvecklingen hos simultant flerspråkiga barn. / There are no standardised tests for assessing bilingual children’s speech and language development, and the knowledge about these children’s typical language development is limited amongst speech and language therapists in Sweden. Studies have shown that this can lead to misdiagnosis of language impairment in these children. The aim of this study is to investigate the narratives of Swedish-English speaking children. Analysis is made, both quantitatively and qualitatively, regarding the macrostructure (story grammar) and the microstructure (linguistic measurements) of the narratives. Narrative comprehension is also examined, and compared with the produced narratives. The participants are 16 simultaneously bilingual Swedish-English speaking children, aged 6-7 years and either attending preschool class or first grade in the Swedish education system. The narratives are elicited using two different sets of pictures from an assessment material designed by a research group within COST Action IS0804. The assessment material also contains comprehension questions and a form for carers to fill in, regarding the children’s linguistic backgrounds. The results in this study show no macrostructural differences between the Swedish and the English narratives, which indicates that narrative ability is not necessarily language dependent. There is a clear difference between the comprehension and production of selected story grammar components. Despite the limited production of characters’ goals in the narratives, the participants appear to have established the comprehension of this story grammar component. The microstructural analysis of the narratives shows that the English narratives are both longer and more complex than the Swedish ones. There are differences between participants attending Swedish preschool class and participants attending Swedish first grade, with regards to both macrostructure and microstructure. The differences indicate that language and narrative ability is increasing between the ages of 6 and 7. Crosslinguistic influence appears to be a natural part of typical language development in simultaneously bilingual children.