The role of inference making and other language skills in the development of narrative listening comprehension in 4-6-year-old children

Lepola, J., Lynch, J, Laakkonen, E., Silven, M., & Pekka, N. (2012). The role of inference making and other language skills in the development of narrative listening comprehension in 4-6-year-old children. Reading Research Quarterly, 47(3), 259-282.


One thing is very clear from the research described here: the construction of meaning is a complex task. Furthermore, learning how to effectively construct meaning is a developmental process. It involves the intertwined learning of many different skills over time, skills that interact with and mediate among each other along a developmental trajectory, skills that may even have reciprocal effects upon each other. The authors of this study from Finland were mainly interested in the relationship between young children’s inference-making skill and their comprehension of narratives that were read to them. However, the researchers also looked at a number of other variables thought to relate to later reading comprehension, including vocabulary knowledge, sentence memory, and phonological awareness.

This was a true longitudinal study, with multiple measures of the variables taken from the same group of 130 Finnish children at ages 4, 5, and 6. A conceptual model was constructed to illustrate the interrelationships among the variables, and data on each variable were collected and used to construct path analyses along several models in order to clarify the various relationships. The authors concluded that inference-making skill was probably a key variable in children’s listening comprehension, which in turn could predict later reading comprehension. If one accepts these findings, then a case might be made for more deliberate, systematic inclusion of instruction in inference-making, beginning as early as the preschool and kindergarten years. Though the authors predicted that phonological awareness would be related to listening comprehension, they really did not find a significant relationship between those two variables, though the story was different for vocabulary knowledge, which historically has been linked with all kinds of meaning comprehension as well as general cognitive ability and seemed to be strongly related to the comprehension measures used here as well.

The account of the research here was very thorough and detailed, but becomes a bit “rough going” once the reader gets into the Results section, where the various data analyses are described. This particular journal is one of the best for making accounts of sophisticated analyses accessible, but unless one has worked closely with the kinds of models these researchers employed, it is easy to be “left in the dust” by all of the various procedures. I managed to make it through myself without losing my grip on the meaning entirely, but I have to admit that I was holding on by my fingernails at several points along the way. What really helped, though, were the clear Figures depicting the conceptual model and the various path analysis models. Seeing the relationships visually kept me from getting lost in the statistical jargon.

One side note before I conclude: As is usual for me when reading studies from countries outside of North America in this international literacy journal, the description of the study sample and the educational context in which the study took place fascinated me. When the authors stated that the educational level of the mothers of the children in the study was just “slightly” above the average for women 25-49 years old in Finland, and provided some pretty high percentages for educational attainment of these “slightly above average mothers”, I just had to stop and find out what kind of percentages were average in the U.S. The reader here can do the same thing for himself or herself, and I encourage you to do so, but suffice it to say that our averages in the U.S. do not compare very favorably. The authors also almost casually mention that ALL kindergarten children in Finland receive free lunch, and that 70% of 4- and 5-year olds in Finland attend municipal day care centers (p. 264-265). So much for the measures of socioeconomic status that we typically use in the U.S.! What might this tell us about what some might call “big government” involvement in a country’s educational system? Reading this portion of the article made me want to look more at the educational system in Finland and how it compares to ours. The authors do mention an achievement gap between boys and girls in Finland (though they did not find a significant relationship for gender in their study), but the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic dynamics we have here in the U.S. are obviously very different from those in Finland. I’d like to look further at countries whose average educational attainment beats that of the U.S. What do they do differently? Or is the context in the U.S. so unique that comparisons would be meaningless?