Comprehension Monitoring

A Developmental Effect?

dwalters{at}chorus.net

This study investigated whether children's comprehension monitoring skills follow a developmental effect as postulated by Dollaghan and Kaston (1986) in their treatment sequence for developing comprehension monitoring skills. Participants were 36 children grouped by age into 3-, 6-, and 9-year-olds who were developing normally. Each child was administered the Test of Auditory Comprehension of Language- Revised (TACL-R; Carrow-Woolfolk, 1985). Participants were then required to follow audiorecorded instructions to manipulate objects in front of them. The instructions were either adequate, distorted in acoustic signal, had inadequate content, or were excessively lengthy and complex. Verbal reactions to the three types of inadequate messages, and the proportion of reactions requesting clarification, were each analyzed in two-way ANOVAs, age group by message type. Children verbally reacted to inadequate content of directions more frequently than distorted or lengthy/complex messages, both in verbal comment and in the proportion of clarification requests. Age interacted with item type, but no evidence for a developmental effect was found. Nor did sentence comprehension (TACL-R) correlate with verbally expressed comprehension monitoring. These results suggest that children may be monitoring possible actions in the world rather than monitoring their own understanding of messages.

Key Words: comprehension monitoring, language development, requests for clarification

Submitted on June 1, 1999
Accepted on December 21, 1999

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