Effect of Imagery Training on Children's Comprehension of Pronouns

Abstract

Children with good and poor listening comprehension (n = 17 in each group) 9–10 years of age were trained to self-generate mental images for sentences and stories. Their ability to identify the antecedents of personal pronouns in individual sentences and also to select the appropriate pronoun in a story cloze task was assessed pre- and posttraining. In general, posttraining scores were significantly higher than pretraining scores. In both tasks, imagery training benefitted poor comprehenders when the pronoun and antecedent were close and good comprehenders when the pronoun and its antecedent were distant. The authors discuss these findings in relation to the memory demands of the task. This study shows that even 9–10-year-olds may experience difficulties with pronoun comprehension in particular circumstances, but that these difficulties can be reduced with a nonverbal support strategy.