Young children’s updating of mental representations of story characters and events based on verbal and pictorial information

The ability to create mental models of story events is essential for narrative comprehension, yet little is known about the mechanisms that support children’s ability to build and update an integrated mental representation of a story (a ‘situation model’) as it unfolds. The current study investigated very young children’s ability to update their situation model of a simple story from verbal and pictorial information about a physical event, manipulating both the explicitness of verbal information and the informativeness (Study 1) and presence (Study 2) of pictorial information. Sixty-four 2-year-olds (35 girls) and 67 3-year-olds (36 girls) participated in Study 1, and 119 2-year-olds (69 girls) and 81 3-year-olds (43 girls) participated in Study 2. Two- and 3-year-olds updated their mental representation of the physical state of the story protagonist at a rate above chance, regardless of the informativeness of an accompanying picture (Study 1) and the explicitness of verbal information provided (Study 2). However, children’s age in months significantly predicted 2-year-olds’ performance across studies, and in the absence of a picture, 3-year-olds performed less robustly when receiving implicit than when receiving explicit verbal information. Findings suggest that 2- and 3-year-olds can integrate implicit information into their situation model of a story, even when the accompanying pictorial information is not maximally informative, but that implicit verbal information embedded in a narrative presents challenges for young children’s updating when provided without pictorial support.