ABSTRACT
The study is part of a research programme focusing on children’s and adolescents’ competence in text comprehension. The current experiment was designed to investigate whether the performance in story comprehension — coherent understanding of an interpersonal conflict — depends on cognitive development, i.e., on the adolescents’ ability to discover formal operations. Several studies have demonstrated that performance in comprehending stories improves with age. But there is still a great variation in the age at which subjects achieve the level of formal operations. Seventy fifth to eighth-grade students were asked to summarise the main ideas of a story. Additionally, a syllogism test was employed to test their cognitive level. Results indicate that both conditional reasoning ability and understanding of interpersonal conflicts are indicators of the same latent developmental process.
