Abstract

PINTO CAMARGO, Johanna  and  BARREYRO, Juan Pablo. Oral narrative comprehension and individual differences in 7 and 11-year-old children: vocabulary, working memory and Theory of Mind. Cienc. Psicol. [online]. 2024, vol.18, n.1, e3477.  Epub June 01, 2024. ISSN 1688-4094.  https://doi.org/10.22235/cp.v18i1.3477.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the role of vocabulary, working memory, Theory of Mind, and sustained attention in the comprehension of oral narratives and the generation of inferences in children aged 7 to 11. Reading comprehension skills were used as the criterion to establish the study's cohort groups. A total of 126 Spanish-speaking Colombian children participated in the study. They were assessed using tasks that measured comprehension of oral narratives, as well as standardized tests of vocabulary, working memory, Theory of Mind, and sustained attention. The results indicated a significant difference in vocabulary between the group of poor comprehenders and the comparison group with better comprehension performance. The poor comprehenders also performed worse than the comparison group in the narrative comprehension test with visual support, as a result of significant differences in responding to emotional inference questions. The correlational analysis showed that the vocabulary variable was associated with all measures of oral narrative comprehension. Additionally, working memory correlated with almost all measures of oral narrative comprehension, except for answering inference questions when the text did not have visual support. Finally, Theory of Mind demonstrated a significant correlation with answering emotional inference questions and the measures without visual support.

Keywords : narrative comprehension; vocabulary; working memory; Theory of Mind; sustained attention.

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