Developing Successful Readers: Building Early ComprehensionSkills through Television Viewing and Listening

Panayiota Kendeou,1,4 Julie S. Lynch,2 Paul van den Broek,1 Chris A. Espin,1

Mary Jane White,1 and Kathleen E. Kremer3

Developing the ability to read is a complex process involving a variety of skills, including bothbasic language skills and language comprehension skills. Although a balanced reading pro-gram would include the development of basic language and comprehension skills, compre-

hension has often been overlooked in early reading instruction. In this article, we examinerecent research ndings on how comprehension skills develop in young children and discussthe implications of those ndings for comprehension assessment and interventions.

KEY WORDS: reading; literacy; comprehension; narratives; listening comprehension; children; media.

INTRODUCTION

For many children, the process of learning toread begins early, even before the beginning of formalinstruction in schools. Current views of early readingdevelopment hold that the development of the abilityto read is a complex process involving a variety ofskills (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Whitehurst &Lonigan, 1998), including basic language skills(Perfetti, 1994) and language comprehension skills(Dickinson & Snow, 1987; Snow, 1983). In this arti-cle, we focus on language comprehension skills and,particularly, on narrative comprehension. Our aim isto discuss recent research ndings on how compre-hension skills develop in young children, the relationbetween early narrative comprehension skills andlater reading comprehension, and the implications ofour research and the research of others for compre-

hension assessment and interventions. In ourresearch, we take a unique approach by hypothesiz-ing that comprehension skills develop simultaneouslywith, rather than following, basic language skills.

Basic language skills such as phonemic aware-ness, print, graphic, morphological, and syntacticawareness (Bruning, Schraw, & Ronning, 1999) areessential for children to become uent readers (Catts,Fey, Zhang, & Tomblin, 1999; Ehri, Nunes, Stahl, &Willows, 2001; Leppanen, Niemi, Aunola, Nurmi,2004; Morris, Bloodgood, Lomax, & Perney, 2003).These skills enable children to decode and readwords, as well as recognize signs, labels, and otherforms of print. Although important for early readingdevelopment, basic language skills are not enough.Successful reading also requires the development ofcomprehension skills.

Comprehension depends on knowledge thatcannot always be found in a single word or sentence(Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998). Comprehension isthe outcome of reading when readers successfullyconnect statements and ideas in the text in order toform a coherent mental representation of the text(Trabasso & van den Broek, 1985). This mentalrepresentation is based on both the text itself and

1University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA.2Saginaw Valley State University, University Center, MI, USA.3Fischer Price Headquarters, East Aurora, NY, USA.4Correspondence should be directed to Panayiota Kendeou,

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA; e-mail:

kend0040@umn.edu

Early Childhood Education Journal, Vol. 33, No. 2, October 2005 ( 2005)DOI: 10.1007/s10643-005-0030-6

911082-3301/05/1000-0091/0 2005 Springer ScienceBusiness Media, Inc.

the readers background knowledge (Graesser,Singer, & Trabasso, 1994; Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978;van den Broek, 1994). Although acknowledged as animportant part of a complete and balanced readingprogram (National Reading Panel, 2000), compre-hension often has been overlooked in early readinginstruction (Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2004; Dole,Duy, Roehler, & Pearson, 1991; Oakhill, Cain, &Bryant, 2003; Paris & Paris, 2003; Pearson &Gallagher, 1983; Pressley, 2000; Taylor, Peterson,Pearson, & Rodriguez, 2002). One reason for thelack of attention devoted to comprehension in earlyreaders is an assumption that the development ofbasic language skills (e.g., decoding of words, sen-tences) must precede the development of compre-hension skills. A dierent approach to readingdevelopment, and one that we take in our research,is that comprehension skills develop simultaneouslywith, rather than following, basic language skills.This alternative approach to reading developmenthas important implications for reading comprehen-sion assessment and interventions.

YOUNG CHILDRENS NARRATIVECOMPREHENSION

Comprehension is a family of skills and activi-ties. As a result, comprehension in its dierent formscannot be quantied and assessed easily along a sin-gle dimension -unlike phenomena such as height,weight, strength, and perhaps even basic readingskills such as vocabulary and phonological awareness(van den Broek et al., 2005). At the same time, thedierent types of comprehension share a largecommon core of processes. Comprehension isassumedexplicitly or implicitlyto involve inter-pretation of the information in a text, the use of priorknowledge to do so and, ultimately, the constructionof a coherent representation or picture of what thetext is about in the readers mind (e.g., Applebee,1978; Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978; Trabasso, Secco, &van den Broek, 1984).

The ability to mentally interconnect dierentevents in the text into a coherent whole is at the coreof comprehension (Trabasso et al., 1984). Events ina text can be related in many ways, but perhapsthe most important type of connection is causal(Graesser et al., 1994; van den Broek, 1997). Causalconnections can take many dierent forms dependingon the kinds of events they connect (Trabasso, vanden Broek, & Suh, 1989). For instance, physicalcausal connections refer to relations between physical

events depicted in a text. Consider the following pairof sentences:

It was extremely cold outside.

The small lake was frozen.

These two sentences are connected by a physicalcausal connection. A second example is motivationalcausal connections that refer to relations betweengoal events and actions in the text. Consider thefollowing second pair of sentences:

David wanted to buy a laptop but did not have en-

ough money.

He decided to get a part-time job.

These two sentences are connected by a motivationalcausal connection. Moreover, there are more types ofcausal connections in addition to physical and moti-vational ones (see Trabasso et al., 1989 for a review).

When readers engage in inference making andgenerate causal connections such as those exempliedabove to interconnect the events of the narrativesthey read, they form a mental network representationof the narrative. This mental network mirrors therelations between events that readers recognizedduring reading. Consider, for example, the storyabout Jimmy and his bike depicted in Figure 1. Eachsentence in the story is represented in the network asa circle with the corresponding number. The arrowsbetween the circles represent causal connections thatthe readers likely identify between the sentences.

For instance, when reading the story we makethe connection that Jimmy seeing his friends bike(sentence 2) causes him to think that the bike is neat(sentence 3), and then to want a bike for himself(sentence 4). The resulting network representation inFigure 1 is simple because the story is relatively shortand straight-forward. In addition, we included onlycausal connections between sentences in the text andnot any possible connections with backgroundknowledge.

These networks capture important aspects ofreaders comprehension and, indeed, guide childrenscomprehension of stories (see van den Broek, 1997for a review of this literature). Children are morelikely to remember events with many causal connec-tions than events with few connections. For example,they are more likely to remember that Jimmy wanteda bike (sentence 4; a statement that has 6 connec-tions) than that Jimmy was pleased with his bike(sentence 17; a statement that has 1 connection). Inaddition to remembering events with many connec-tions better, children include such events in summariesmore often and rate them as more important than

92 Kendeou et al.

events with only a few connections. In addition, whenchildren are asked questions about why an eventhappened they respond with answers that are based onthese causal connections. For example, when askedWhy did Jimmy want to save $100 (sentence 7) childrenare likely to answer by connecting to the informationthat he wanted a bike (sentence 4).

The above observations about the developmentof childrens comprehension have primarily involvedelementary school children. Research on youngerchildren (e.g., pre-school, kindergarten) is limitedbecause it is dicult to assess comprehension in non-readers (Bourg, Bauer, & van den Broek, 1997).Comprehension can be assessed, however, in non-reading contexts by presenting stories in dierentmedia. For example, stories can be presented usingpictures (Paris & Paris, 2003), aurally, or via televi-sion (van den Broek, Lorch, & Thurlow, 1996).

Using a variety of media such as television andprint to assess comprehension assumes that compre-hension skills transfer across these media. Thistransfer of skills is plausible for several reasons. First,television and print require similar cognitive pro-cesses to comprehend (e.g., making connections,sequencing events, generating inferences). Second,research indicates that similar structural story factorspredict what children (both in kindergarten and ele-mentary school) remember from both televised andwritten narratives (Lorch & Sanchez, 1997; van den

Broek et al., 1996; van den Broek, 1997). Finally,television programs and printed materials canoverlap substantially in content.

Drawing on these ndings, we conducted a studyto examine the role of narrative comprehension in thedevelopment of childrens literacy skills in kinder-garten and the early elementary school years. Chil-dren ages 4 and 6 were shown or listened to narrativespresented either by video or by audiotape. Afterviewing or listening to each narrative, the childrenrecalled the story and answered comprehensionquestions aimed at dierent levels of inference mak-ing related to the causal structure of the narrative.They also completed measures of vocabulary andbasic language skills such as letter identication,word identication, and phonological awareness.

The results indicated that the measures of narra-tive comprehension across television and aural pre-sentation were highly interrelated, suggesting thatnarrative comprehension is not specic to the mediumin which narratives are presented (see the left side ofFigure 2). The relation between comprehension indierent media was already present in kindergartenchildren, and remained stable as children entered ele-mentary school.Measures of basic language skills werealso highly interrelated amongst themselves. Particu-larly, there was a strong relation between childrensletter and word identication and childrensphonological awareness. Vocabulary was highly

Fig. 1. The Jimmy Story. 1. There once was a boy named Jimmy. 2. One day, Jimmy saw Toms new 10-speed bike. 3. Jimmy thoughtthe bike was neat. 4. He wanted a 10-speed bike. 5. He counted the money he had with him. 6. The money was not enough to buy a bike.

7. Jimmy wanted to save $100. 8. He asked his mother for some money. 9. Jimmys mother said that he should earn his own money. 10.Jimmy wanted to get a paper route. 11. He asked the newspaper manager about a route. 12. Jimmy accepted the paper route. 13. He

delivered the papers early in the morning. 14. He worked until he earned the $100. 15. He picked out a 10-speed bike. 16. He rode his

new bike home. 17. Jimmy was pleased with his bike.

93Developing Successful Readers

related to both narrative comprehension and basiclanguage skills. Most importantly, the results showedthat narrative comprehension was largely independentof basic language skills such as phonological aware-ness, letter identication, and word identication forboth 4- and 6-year-olds.

These ndings suggest that comprehension ofnarratives is systematic across media and developsindependently from basic language skills (e.g., letteridentication, word identication, phonologicalawareness). In other words, the two types of skillsrepresent relatively separate sets of abilities, both ofwhich develop at a very young age. The medium-gen-eral nature of these comprehension processes suggeststhe possibility that comprehension skills acquired at anearly age in non-reading contexts may support readingcomprehension in elementary school, just as vocabu-lary and other basic language skills (e.g., letter andword identication, phonological awareness) havebeen found to do. If found to be valid, this possibilitywould have important theoretical and practicalimplications. From a theoretical point of view, it isimportant to understand all factors that may make aunique contribution to reading comprehension. Thisunderstanding will establish a more comprehensiveframework for research on childrens reading devel-opment. From a practical point of view, this under-

standing will contribute towards eective design,implementation, and assessment of instructionalreading programs.

EARLY NARRATIVE COMPREHENSIONAND THE DEVELOPMENT OF READINGCOMPREHENSION

To investigate the relation between early nar-rative comprehension in dierent media and thedevelopment of later reading comprehension, weretested the children from the study described abovetwo years later, as they turned 6- and 8-years old,respectively. The children were again shown or lis-tened to narratives presented either by video or byaudiotape following the same procedures as twoyears earlier (i.e., recall and answer comprehensionquestions). In addition, the 8-year-olds also com-pleted a reading comprehension task in which theywere asked to read an age-appropriate narrative,recall it, and answer comprehension questions. Allchildren, again, completed basic language measuresof letter/word identication and of receptivevocabulary.

The results indicated that narrative comprehensionof aural and television narratives at age 6 directly pre-dicted reading comprehension at age 8 (see Figure 2).

Fig. 2. Summary of results. Note. Arrows indicate variables that were found to be related. The results for the 4-year old cohort are the

same as those for the 6-year old cohort.

94 Kendeou et al.

Some basic language skills, in particular wordidentication at age 6 were also related directly toreading comprehension at age 8. Most importantly,comprehension of aural and televised narratives atage 6 signicantly predicted reading comprehensionat age 8, over and above the eects of word identi-cation and vocabulary.

In summary, the ndings from these studiesshow that kindergarten childrens narrative compre-hension skills in non-reading contexts signicantlypredict their later reading comprehension. They alsoshow that across-media comprehension involvesmany of the same cognitive processes. These pro-cesses most likely emerge relatively early in develop-ment, and are acquired in non-reading contexts suchas television viewing and story telling, to a signicantdegree independently from basic language skills. Thedevelopmental/instructional model in Figure 3conceptually captures this scenario.

This model is dierent from the traditionalinstructional model in which comprehension skills areassumed to develop only after the acquisition of basiclanguage skills. In this new model, both basic lan-guage skills and comprehension skills contributeindependently to childrens reading development anddevelop concurrently.

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS

Comprehension skills are a unique and essentialcomponent of reading comprehension and, therefore,must be considered in conjunction with basic lan-guage skills when designing approaches to earlyreading instruction. In particular, explicit instruction

of comprehension skills in non-reading contexts maybe benecial even before formal reading instructionbegins. In this section, we provide examples of waysthat comprehension skills may be promoted at anearly age.

Comprehension Assessment

One direct implication of our research is in thearea of assessment. Our results indicate that youngchildrens comprehension can be assessed via the useof aural or televised stories and, importantly, that thisassessment can be used to predict future compre-hension performance. Thus, such assessment mightbe used for early identication of students whoare likely to experience later diculties in readingcomprehension.

Three principles drawn from our research can beused to guide the assessment of comprehension skillsin young children (van den Broek, et al., 2005). First,comprehension skills start to develop early in a childslife. Second, comprehension is similar across dierentmedia and, third, the assessment of comprehensionskills should focus on various aspects rather than asingle aspect or score.

To assess comprehension skills in young childrenwe have developed a methodology that is based onthese three principles, with the assessment of com-prehension focusing primarily on the structure of themental representation of the narrative. In this meth-odology, children rst watch television narratives orlisten to aurally presented narratives. Children arethen asked to recall everything they remember fromthe stories. Finally, children answer questions aimed

Fig. 3. A New developmental/instructional model.

95Developing Successful Readers

at dierent levels of inference making related to thecausal structure of the narrative. Childrens compre-hension is measured by assessing the quality of theirmemory representation of the narratives, in terms ofthe extent to which their recall focuses on the eventsand facts that have many connections to other eventsand facts, and in terms of their ability to answercomprehension questions at dierent levels of infer-ence making. The emphasis in this assessmentapproach is on the patterns of recall and questionanswering, rather than just on the amount. As chil-drens skills develop, the amount recalled will increasebut, more importantly, the pattern of recall willchange, focusing more and more on those events orfacts that play a central role in the structure of anarrative.

Comprehension Interventions

The aforementioned conceptual framework alsohas implications for instruction. One importantimplication relates to the types of materials one mightuse in developing comprehension interventions. Ourresults imply that, for young children, comprehensioninterventions could be developed through use oftelevised or aural stories. There is precedent in theliterature for such an approach to the development ofreading comprehension. For example, in their devel-opment of Reciprocal Teaching, Palinscar and Brown(1984) successfully improved reading comprehensionskills of pre-reading children and children withreading diculties using aurally presented text. Fuchsand Fuchs (Fuchs, Fuchs, Mathes, & Simmons, 1997)in the development of Peer Assisted Learning Strat-egies (PALS) have also made use of aurally presentedmaterial for the development reading comprehensionskills in students with special needs. To date, thisresearch has not been extended to preschool children,nor has it made use of televised stories. Our researchreveals that such materials can be used successfullywith preschool children for assessment purposes;thus, we have reason to believe that these materialsmight be also used with such young children forintervention purposes.

The use of television or aural stories oers sev-eral advantages over the use of printed text alone foryoung children, even if they have some reading skills.Televised and aural stories can be highly motivatingfor young children. Television is an attractive toolthat can be used early in a childs life. In addition,both television viewing and listening to stories caneasily be used with a large group of children, and can

take place in school as well as non-school (e.g., home)settings. The use of dierent non-written media mayprovide a unique opportunity for children to lear-nand be taughtcomprehension strategies that arenot completely dependent upon verbal (includingreading) skills. Such advantages make it possible toteach comprehension strategies to a wide range ofchildren at various verbal ability levels and ages.

A second implication from our research relatesto the type of comprehension interventions that mightbe used for young children. The work of Palinscarand Brown, and Fuchs and Fuchs provide examplesof the types of interventions that might be used in thecomprehension development of young children. Forexample, in reciprocal teaching children learn tosummarize, predict, clarify, and ask questions. At thesimplest level, such interventions could be used withyoung children after listening to or viewing a story.Our research implies that such interventions might bestrengthened by tying them to the causal structure ofthe text. For example, rather than just teachingchildren to predict or question, teachers mightstructure the prediction and questioning activities tofocus on the events that are important for establish-ing the causal structure of the text. The goal of thesemore directed interventions would be to develop andinternalize in children the skills to identify meaningfulconnections (such as causal ones) between variousparts of a story, to be able to recognize when suchconnections are needed for comprehension, and to beable to infer these connections (Trabasso, van denBroek, & Liu, 1988).

To see how interventions, such as questioningactivities, might be designed around the causalstructure of the story, consider the following exam-ple. Imagine children listening to or viewing a story.Teachers then ask the children questions aimed atdierent levels of inference making, from concreteconnections between story events to connections be-tween entire episodes or themes. Directed questioningcould help children to identify causes and conse-quences in the story (e.g., Why did this happen?),characters goals (e.g., What made him/her dothat?), characters actions (e.g., What did he/she doto achieve the goal?) and themes (e.g., What didthe character learn and what events in the storyhelped him/her learn this?). The questions would bedeveloped based on the causal network structure ofthe story, focusing on the causally important parts ofthe text, and the goal would be to teach children tointernalize strategies in order to make meaningfulconnections between the dierent events of the story,

96 Kendeou et al.

and to answer why and how questions successfully.Ultimately, the aim would be for children to transferthese strategies to novel situations, generating andanswering questionsimplicitly or explicitlywith-out being instructed to do so.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

In the present article, we have reviewed recenttheoretical advances in the study of childrens com-prehension abilities, presented the main ndings ofour research on the development of narrative com-prehension skills, and discussed several potentialimplications for educational practice. The centralidea is that childrens narrative comprehension skillsdevelop early in childrens lives and, to a considerabledegree, independently from basic language skills.Moreover, comprehension skills are not specic tothe medium in which narratives are presented, but aresimilar across dierent media. These observationsalso suggest that comprehension skills developed atan early age in non-reading contexts support laterreading comprehension. Thus, comprehension skillsacquired in dierent media can transfer to reading.

These ndings have important implications forpractice in early childhood education. They suggestmethods for comprehension assessment as well as forinterventions. Together, they may provide teacherswith new tools in their instructional tool box andwith an understanding of why some of the existingtools are eective.

REFERENCES

Applebee, A. (1978). The childs concept of a story: Ages two toseventeen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bourg, T., Bauer, P., & van den Broek, P. (1997). Building thebridges: the development of event comprehension and repre-sentation. In P. Broekvan den, P. Bauer, & T. Bourg (Eds.),Developmental spans in event comprehension (pp. 385407).Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Bruning, R. H., Schraw, G. J., & Ronning, R. R. (1999). Cognitivepsychology and instruction. Upper Saddle River, NJ: PrenticeHall.

Cain, K., Oakhill, J., & Bryant, P. E. (2004). Childrens readingcomprehension ability: Concurrent prediction by workingmemory, verbal ability, and component skills. Journal ofEducational Psychology, 96, 3142.

Catts, H. W., Fey, M. E., Zhang, X., & Tomblin, B. J. (1999).Language basis of reading and reading disabilities: Evidencefrom a longitudinal investigation. Scientic Studies of Reading,3(4), 331361.

Dickinson, D. K., & Snow, C. E. (1987). Interrelationships amongprereading and oral language skills in kindergartners from twosocial classes. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 2, 125.

Dole, J. A., Duy, G. G., Roehler, L. R., & Pearson, P. D. (1991).Moving from the old to the new: Research on readingcomprehension instruction. Review of Educational Research,61, 239264.

Ehri, L. C., Nunes, S., Stahl, S., & Willows, D. (2001). Systematicphonics instruction helps students learn to read: Evidencefrom the National Reading Panels meta-analysis. Review ofEducational Research, 71, 393447.

Fuchs, D., Fuchs, L. S., Mathes, P. G., & Simmons, D. C. (1997).Peer-assisted learning strategies: Making classrooms moreresponsive to diversity. American Educational Research Jour-nal, 34, 174206.

Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading andreading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7, 610.

Graesser, A., Singer, M., & Trabasso, T. (1994). Constructinginferences during narrative comprehension. PsychologicalReview, 101, 371395.

Kintsch, W., & van Dijk, T. A. (1978). Toward a model of textcomprehension and production. Psychological Review, 85(5),363394.

Leppanen, U., Niemi, P., Aunola, K., & Nurmi, J. E. (2004).Development of reading skills among preschool and primaryschool pupils. Reading Research Quarterly, 39, 7293.

Lorch, E. P., & Sanchez, R. P. (1997). Childrens memory fortelevised events. In P. Broekvan den, P. J. Bauer, & T. Bourg(Eds.), Developmental spans in event comprehension and repre-sentation (pp. 271291). Mahwah, NJ: LEA.

Morris, D., Bloodgood, J. W., Lomax, R. G., & Parney, J. (2003).Developmental steps in learning to read: A longitudinal studyin kindergarten and rst grade. Reading Research Quarterly,38, 302328.

National Reading Panel (2000). Teaching children to read: Anevidence-based assessment of the scientic research literature onreading and its implications for reading instruction. Jessup, MD:National Institute for Literacy.

Oakhill, J., Cain, K., & Bryant, P. E. (2003). The dissociation ofword reading and text comprehension: Evidence from com-ponent skills. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18, 443468.

Palincsar, A. S., & Brown, A. L. (1984). Reciprocal teaching ofcomprehension-fostering and monitoring activities. Cognitionand Instruction, 1, 117175.

Paris, A. H., & Paris, S. G. (2003). Assessing narrative compre-hension in young children. Reading Research Quarterly, 38,3676.

Pearson, P. D., & Gallagher, M. C. (1983). The instruction ofreading comprehension. Contemporary Educational Psychol-ogy, 8, 317344.

Perfetti, C. A. (1994). Psycholinguistics and reading ability. In M.A. Gernsbacher (Ed.), Handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 849894). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Pressley, M. (2000). What should comprehension instruction be theinstruction of?. In M. L. Kamil, P. B. Mosenthal, P. D.Pearson, & R. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (Vol.3, pp. 545586). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Pressley, M., & McCormick, C. B. (1995). Advanced educationalpsychology for educators, researchers, and policymakers. NewYork: HarperCollins.

Snow, C. E. (1983). Literacy and language: Relationships duringpreschool years. Harvard Educational Review, 53(2), 165189.

Taylor, B., Peterson, D. S., Pearson, P. D., & Rodriguez, M. C.(2001). Looking inside classrooms: Reecting on the how aswell as the what in eective reading instruction. The ReadingTeacher, 56, 270279.

Trabasso, T., Secco, T., & van den Broek, P. (1984). Causal cohesionand story coherence. In H. Mandl, N. L. Stein, & T. Trabasso(Eds.), Learning and comprehension of text (pp. 83111).Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Trabasso, T., & van den Broek, P. (1985). Causal thinking and therepresentation of narrative events. Journal of Memory andLanguage, 24, 612630.

Trabasso, T., van den Broek, P., & Liu, L. (1988). A model forgenerating questions that assess and promote comprehension.Questioning Exchange, 2, 2538.

97Developing Successful Readers

Trabasso, T., van den Broek, P., & Suh, S. (1989). Logical necessityand transitivity of causal relations in stories. DiscourseProcesses, 12, 125.

van den Broek, P. (1994). Comprehension and memory of narrativetexts. In M. A. Gernsbacher (Ed.), Handbook of psycholin-guistics (pp. 539588). London: Academic Press, Inc.

van den Broek, P. (1997). Discovering the cement of the universe:The development of event comprehension from childhood toadulthood. In P. Broekvan den, P. J. Bauer, & T. Bourg (Eds.),Developmental spans in event comprehension and representation(pp. 321342). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

van den Broek, P., Kendeou, P., Kremer, K., Lynch, J. S., Butler,J., White, M. J., & Lorch, E. P. (2005). Assessment ofcomprehension abilities in young children. In S. Paris, & S.Stahl (Eds.), New directions in assessment of reading compre-hension (pp. 107130). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

van den Broek, P., Lorch, E. P., & Thurlow, R. (1996). Childrensand adults memory for television stories: The role of causalfactors, story-grammar categories, and hierarchical level. ChildDevelopment, 67, 30103028.

Whitehurst, G. J., & Lonigan, C. J. (1998). Child development andemergent literacy. Child Development, 69, 848872.

98 Kendeou et al.

/ColorImageDict > /JPEG2000ColorACSImageDict > /JPEG2000ColorImageDict > /AntiAliasGrayImages false /DownsampleGrayImages true /GrayImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /GrayImageResolution 150 /GrayImageDepth -1 /GrayImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeGrayImages true /GrayImageFilter /DCTEncode /AutoFilterGrayImages true /GrayImageAutoFilterStrategy /JPEG /GrayACSImageDict > /GrayImageDict > /JPEG2000GrayACSImageDict > /JPEG2000GrayImageDict > /AntiAliasMonoImages false /DownsampleMonoImages true /MonoImageDownsampleType /Bicubic /MonoImageResolution 600 /MonoImageDepth -1 /MonoImageDownsampleThreshold 1.50000 /EncodeMonoImages true /MonoImageFilter /CCITTFaxEncode /MonoImageDict > /AllowPSXObjects false /PDFX1aCheck false /PDFX3Check false /PDFXCompliantPDFOnly false /PDFXNoTrimBoxError true /PDFXTrimBoxToMediaBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXSetBleedBoxToMediaBox true /PDFXBleedBoxToTrimBoxOffset [ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000 ] /PDFXOutputIntentProfile (None) /PDFXOutputCondition () /PDFXRegistryName (http://www.color.org?) /PDFXTrapped /False

/Description >>> setdistillerparams> setpagedevice