Comprehension monitoring: A developmental effect?

This study investigated whether children's comprehension monitoring skills follow a developmental effect as postulated by Dollaghan and Kaston (1986) in their treatment sequence for developing comprehension monitoring skills. Participants were 36 children grouped by age into 3-, 6-, and 9-year-olds who were developing normally. Each child was administered the Test of Audit ory Comprehension of Language-Revised (TACL-R; Carrow-Woolfolk, 1985). Part icipants were then required to follow audio-recorded instructions to manipu late objects in front of them. The instructions were either adequate, disto rted in acoustic signal, had inadequate content, or were excessively length y and complex. Verbal reactions to the three types of inadequate messages, and the proportion of reactions requesting clarification, were each analyze d in two-way ANOVAs, age group by message type. Children verbally reacted t o inadequate content of directions more frequently than distorted or length y/complex messages, both in Verbal comment and in the proportion of clarifi cation requests. Age interacted with item type, but no evidence for a devel opmental effect was found. Nor did sentence comprehension (TACL-R) correlat e with verbally expressed comprehension monitoring. These results suggest t hat children may be monitoring possible actions in the world rather than mo nitoring their own understanding of messages.