| Abstract: | Examined immediate and delayed recall of a narrative and an informative text by 5th, 9th, and 12th graders. The younger Ss produced shorter recall than the 2 older groups. Informative text led to shorter recall than narrative text at all 3 scholastic levels. Long-term results indicated the same effects for type of text. In the short term, 5th graders produced less similar propositions than did the 2 older groups, suggesting that they had more difficulty accepting the idea that a rewording could be semantically equivalent to a literal sentence. This finding indicates that the capacity to produce synonyms and paraphrases, necessary for the elaboration of summaries, increases with age. This tendency also increased with the passage of time. Differences were found in the quantity of these types of production between the 2 high-school groups, with the 9th graders producing less similar propositions than the 12th graders. (French & English abstracts) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
