Finding New Meanings: Children's Recognition of Interpretive Ambiguity in Text

This research was designed to investigate children's developing ability to detect one form of interpretive uncertainty, specifically, that a text passage could support two alternative interpretations. Three experiments were conducted with second graders (7- to 8-year-olds) and fourth graders (9- to 10-year-olds), using brief text passages designed to suggest two interpretations about the cause of a target event. The results indicated that older children were significantly more likely to report two interpretations of the passages. Children in both grades reported more second interpretations when the text information was presented as a narrative rather than as an expository passage. Children's initial interpretations generally reflected the causal information most recently encountered in the passage.