ABSTRACT
Psychologists and educators have recently become interested in story comprehension as a way of obtaining clues as to how people organize meaning in text. Stories have been studied in many forms, including films and picture sequences, as well as oral and written narratives. The grammar consists of a set of syntactic rules that generate a deep structure for a story schema and a set of semantic relation rules that interpret the deep structure. The grammar used in the present research is a modification of the grammars developed by Rumelhart and Thorndyke. The present study was designed specifically to investigate developmental differences in the structure of story schemata used by adults and children for comprehension. Adults more strongly emphasized motivation in terms of the major goal and inferred internal responses of characters; at the same time, they included information about what happened in a story.
