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The relation between ambiguity understanding and metalinguistic discussion of joking riddles in good and poor comprehenders: Potential for intervention and possible processes of change Nicola Yuill First Language 2009 29: 65 DOI: 10.1177/0142723708097561 The online version of this article can be found at: http://fla.sagepub.com/content/29/1/65
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ARTICLE
FIRST LANGUAGE Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC) www.sagepublications.com Vol 29(1): 65–79 (200902) DOI: 10.1177/0142723708097561
The relation between ambiguity understanding and metalinguistic discussion of joking riddles in good and poor comprehenders: Potential for intervention and possible processes of change Nicola Yuill, University of Sussex ABSTRACT This study investigated understanding of language ambiguity as a source of individual differences in children’s reading comprehension skill, and the role of peer metalinguistic discussion in fostering comprehension improvement. Twenty-four 7- to 9-year-old children worked in pairs to discuss and resolve ambiguities in joking riddles. Their reading comprehension increased significantly more than a group of 24 no-treatment controls. Analysis of the children’s discussions shows that comprehension improvement was associated with increases over training sessions in frequency of metalinguistic comments about the text ambiguities, and in particular with the simultaneous explanation of two meanings. We discuss individual differences in metalinguistic and metacognitive capabilities and their role in the process of comprehension improvement. KEYWORDS Ambiguous comprehension; intervention; linguistic humour; metacognition; metalanguage
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Children in the early years of schooling show important changes in their understanding of the relation between text and meaning, as shown for example in the increasing ability to discriminate between verbatim and paraphrase (Lee, Torrance & Olson, 2001), the explicit recognition of interpretive ambiguity (Bonitatibus & Beal, 1996) and the judgement of spoken message adequacy (e.g., Robinson & Robinson, 1983). Olson (1996) argues that the acquisition of literacy brings the understanding that the wording of a text is fixed, but its meaning is subject to interpretation. The interpretive nature of text is particularly salient in the rather specific case of ambiguity deriving from lexical or structural properties of language, where there are two quite different interpretations of a text that are both plausible, as for example in the case of homonyms and of jokes based on linguistic ambiguity. Verbal jokes belong to a genre of language in which multiple interpretations are the explicit focus: to ‘get’ a joke is to appreciate how a particular context misleads us into the wrong interpretation of an ambiguous text. For example, take the joke: ‘How do you make a sausage roll? – Push it down a hill.’ The common meaning of ‘sausage roll’ is a type of savoury food, but the answer to the joke question does not make sense in this context, since an appropriate answer would mention cooking, pastry and sausage meat. The answer can only be understood by reinterpreting the syntax of the question so that it refers to the more unusual, or uncued meaning of a sausage being rolled. Children may understand the basic possibility of lexical and structural ambiguity at a relatively early age, but there seem to be marked individual differences over a wide age range in appreciating these aspects of ambiguity. For example, even in the basic understanding that one word can have different meanings, there is an early conceptual recognition of homonymy at the age of 4 (Doherty, 2000), but many children show poor performance, even up to the age of 10, in selecting referents for pseudohomonyms (Doherty, 2004). Similarly, children from the age of around 7 show competence in understanding at least some types of verbal humour (Hirsh-Pasek, Gleitman & Gleitman, 1978; Shultz, 1974; Shultz & Horibe, 1974), but there are wide individual differences in 7- to 9-year-olds in the ability to recall and explain such jokes (Yuill, 1998). These individual differences in understanding structural ambiguity in language may derive from two general types of process, both of which deserve further investigation. First, children may have difficulties in automatic aspects of processing that affect their interpretation of ambiguous text: for example, Gernsbacher and others (e.g., Gernsbacher, 1990) suggest that activation of irrelevant meanings of ambiguous words competes with the correct interpretation, and less-skilled readers may fail to suppress such irrelevant meanings, or to enhance activation of relevant meanings. Second, Long, Seely & Oppy (1999) suggest that there may be more controllable and strategic processes affecting the selection of appropriate meaning in good and poor readers, which would be particularly evident in tasks that have metacognitive demands (e.g., judgements of meaning rather than lexical decision). This paper investigates understanding of ambiguity at the strategic level in children with good or poor reading comprehension. Literature on children’s reading comprehension suggests that there may be quite pervasive strategic differences between good and poor comprehenders in their general approach to reading. For example, Yuill & Oakhill (1991) report a series of 66 Downloaded from fla.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 10, 2010
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studies on children of 7–9 years who were good readers (decoders) but poor comprehenders. These children were described as showing a lack of metalinguistic awareness, indicated in a variety of different tasks, such as failing to detect incongruities in text, inability to make inferences about the source of their knowledge from spoken text (Oakhill, Yuill & Donaldson, 1990) and poor appreciation of semantic ambiguity (Yuill, 1998). Cain (1999), studying a similar group of children, argued that such children show a lack of ‘sensitivity to meaning’. For example, her sample of 7- to 9-year-old less-skilled comprehenders were poor at answering inferential questions from text, and even when shown the precise location of the text from which to make an inference, some still failed to do so. These comprehension difficulties could not be explained solely in terms of lack of decoding automaticity (Yuill & Oakhill, 1991) or lack of world knowledge (Cain, Oakhill, Barnes & Bryant, 2001). If good and poor comprehenders differ in reading strategies, then we might expect children with poor comprehension to show less appreciation of the relation between literal and intended meaning, and in particular, in understanding structural ambiguity in joking riddles. Yuill (1998) assessed the relation between reading comprehension in 7- to 9-year-olds and their ability to reinterpret ambiguity in joking riddles. Comprehension skill predicted riddle understanding independently of reading accuracy for riddles with plays on meaning, whereas for riddles based on ambiguity in sound, reading accuracy was as strong a predictor of riddle understanding as comprehension (see also Mahoney & Mann, 1998). Given that jokes deliberately manipulate the interpretive nature of language, and that children with poor comprehension seem to adopt a style of reading that shows a relative insensitivity to meaning, the play on meaning in jokes could be a useful medium to train children in the understanding of interpretive ambiguity as a way of improving text comprehension. The particular utility of jokes in fostering an interpretive approach to text is that jokes by definition lead the listener up the garden path: this forces a reassessment of one’s understanding and the construction of an alternative interpretation that makes sense of the joke answer. Yuill (1997) reported a training study in which good and poor comprehenders were given seven sessions discussing ambiguity, double meanings and jokes. Children given ambiguity training improved in comprehension significantly more than those given training with humorous stories that did not involve ambiguity. Exposure to ambiguities in joking riddles might in itself be a useful experience to increase ‘sensitivity to meaning’, but the role of discussion in fostering improvement may also be important. There is a large literature on the role of peer discussion in learning, much of it based on Vygotskyan ideas. Vygotsky (1930/1978) argued that cognitive development occurs through social interaction, and that this development is mediated by language. Higher mental processes (such as comprehension) first appear through dialogue with others, and the language of these dialogues becomes internalized as private speech. Several intervention programmes in the area of reading comprehension have used peer tutoring to help children elaborate their own understanding and to make elaborated explanations to their peers (e.g., Fuchs, Fuchs, Mathes & Simmons, 1997; King, 1990; Palincsar & Brown, 1984). There is also evidence that readers can be trained in explaining text to themselves, as an aid to reading comprehension (e.g., SERT; McNamara, 2004). 67 Downloaded from fla.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 10, 2010
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The purpose of the present study is threefold: to discover whether peer discussion of ambiguity in joking riddles leads to an improvement in children’s text comprehension, to assess whether metalinguistic discussion of ambiguity in training sessions is predicted by initial level of text comprehension skill, and to assess the relation between the type of discussion during intervention and the extent of comprehension improvement on independent outcome measures. Based on the earlier work on comprehension differences in the 7- to 9-year-old range, and the utility of training in this age group, the present study involved children of 7–9 years completing pre- and post-tests of reading comprehension and having paired training in discussing joking riddles playing on semantic ambiguity. We predicted an increase in comprehension skill following discussion of joking riddles and a significant relation between text comprehension skill and metalinguistic discussion. We also explored differences in the nature of discussion according to the extent of comprehension improvement: for example, do children who show more elaborative comments during training show greater levels of improvement?
METHOD Participants Forty-eight children (24 boys and 24 girls) were recruited from four classes of children in years 3 and 4 (ages 7–9 years) in two primary schools in a city in south-east England. One school served a middle-income area and the other a low-income area. Children who did not have parental permission, and those identified by the teacher as having very low literacy or language difficulties were not included.
Assessments At time 1, children were given an individual reading assessment, Form B of the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (Neale, 1989). Children were asked to read a series of short narrative texts and then answer oral comprehension questions, yielding separate age-related scores for reading accuracy and reading comprehension. Within two weeks following the end of the intervention, children were given a parallel form, Form A, of the same test. It should be noted that at one of the schools in particular, many children were reading well below the expected age-level. Comprehension skill was defined primarily in relation to reading accuracy rather than to chronological age.
Allocation of children to training groups The pre-test scores were used to identify 24 children (12 boys, 12 girls) with good and poor comprehension relative to their reading accuracy. We were not able to apply the strict criteria to define poor comprehension as used by Yuill & Oakhill (1991), because of the generally low reading ages in the sample, but we ensured we had two subgroups of better and poorer comprehenders. The remaining
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Table 1 Ages and reading scores in months of better and poorer comprehenders in each pair and in trained vs. control groups: means and (in brackets) SD
Characteristic
Age
Poorer comprehender (n 12) Better comprehender (n 12) Mean trained groups (n 24) Control (n 24)
108.33 110.67 109.50 111.25
(8.2) (3.8) (6.4) (5.2)
Reading accuracy 90.75 85.42 88.08 83.42
(10.7) (15.7) (13.4) (11.4)
Reading comprehension 78.92 92.17 85.54 84.75
(7.0) (12.6) (12.1) (11.8)
24 children (12 girls, 12 boys) formed a no-treatment control group. An ANOVA on age and reading scores for control, trained-better comprehender and trainedpoorer comprehender groups showed no group differences in age (F(2, 47) 1.02, ns), or in reading accuracy (F(2, 47) 1.4, ns), and a main effect of comprehension score (F(2, 47) 4.3, p 0.02), with a post-hoc LSD test (p 0.005) showing a significant difference only between the better and poorer comprehenders. Although age and accuracy differences were not significant, it should be noted that the control group showed a tendency to be poorer in accuracy than the poor comprehenders (LSD p 0.10), and poorer in comprehension than the better comprehenders (LSD p 0.06). Characteristics of each group are shown in Table 1.
Pairing trained children Our own pilot work, and previous literature (e.g., Manion & Alexander, 1997), suggested that peer interaction is more successful when children have unequal skill levels, and that same-sex pairings are effective in group computer-based work (e.g., Fitzpatrick and Hardman, 2000). The trained children were therefore allocated to same-sex poorer-better comprehender pairs according to their school location and teacher advice about who would work well together.
Training software Joke City (Yuill & Bradwell, 1998) is an experimental piece of software that engages children in discussion of jokes based on various types of meaning ambiguity. Instructions are given on the screen, for children to read and carry out. The screen presents a joke question and invites the user to guess the answer. The answer is then shown, and users are prompted to decide which is the ambiguous word or phrase in the joke. The software then provides the correct answers and gives verbal and pictorial explanations of each ambiguity. There are 6 jokes at each of 6 increasingly difficult levels, based on data from a study of children’s re-telling and explanations of jokes (Yuill, 1988). The 18 jokes used here are shown in the Appendix.
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Procedure For all children, pre- and post-assessments of reading were carried out individually in a quiet room. Trained children were given 3 training sessions of about 20 minutes each, spaced over 2 weeks, completing in turn levels 1, 3 and 6 of the software. Training occurred in a quiet room with one of two female trainers, who trained together for half of the sessions to ensure consistency of approach. In the first session, the trainer demonstrated the software for the first joke, explaining anything that was not understood, and left the pair to complete the remainder, only intervening when there were problems with the software, inclarities in what was said or disagreements that the children could not resolve. Sessions were videotaped, and screen activity was logged with a scan converter. The first and third sessions for each pair were transcribed for later coding, using the video of the children’s faces, with the screen activity superimposed on the video. This facilitated interpretation of the discussion, since it was possible to see what was on screen at each point in the conversation. The control children took part in a single, individual experimental session in an unrelated task, judging facial expressions, but no other treatment apart from their normal school lessons and the pre- and post-tests. Session 1 was missing for one pair, and session 3 for another pair, because of equipment failure. Lengths of sessions were fairly uniform, between about 15 and 25 minutes each, but with Session 3 generally slightly shorter as children were more familiar with the software and the task.
Method of coding discussions To address the questions about content of children’s discussions, we required a method of coding discussion that allows us to select utterances in which children discuss possible meanings of the ambiguities in the joking riddles. We used a scheme developed for this purpose by Yuill & George (2006). Each transcript was divided into turns, by speaker, and each turn was separated into topic-based utterances, using the divisions in the coding scheme as a guide. The scheme identifies 6 main categories of talk, as follows: • Metacognitive: comments about what one knows or thinks, whether about the self, joint, or the other. These primarily concerned whether or not the joke was understood and comments about the correctness of a guess. • Metalinguistic: comments involving reflection on or reference to language used in the jokes. These often involved elaborations, rephrasing and explanations of answers. • Guesses: guesses made about what the joke answer or the ambiguous words might be, in response to a question on the screen. • Control talk: statements, questions or responses concerning performance of the task, e.g., requests to read, agreement or disagreement. • Evaluation: emotional responses and evaluations of the material, including prolonged laughter. 70 Downloaded from fla.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 10, 2010
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• Reading text from the screen: children were required to take turns reading aloud the screen text.
Reliability The code had been developed using a separate but similar data set, to reach a criterion of 90% agreement when double-coding 16 sessions for 8 pairs of children (Yuill & George, 2006). Four randomly-chosen sessions from the current data set were also blind double-coded, with 89% agreement. All the remaining sessions were then coded by a single coder.
RESULTS Changes in reading comprehension scores The post-test reading scores and changes from pre-test are shown in Table 2. An ANCOVA of post-test comprehension age, with pre-test comprehension age as a covariate and training group between subjects showed a significant effect of experimental group, F(1, 42) 10.31, p 0.01. As shown in the lower half of Table 2, the trained group as a whole improved significantly more than the control group. A similar ANCOVA comparing the better and poorer comprehenders in each of the trained pairs showed no significant difference in improvement between the better and poorer comprehender of the pairs, F(1, 21) 1. Inspection of the data for the poorer comprehenders on post-test showed an average comprehension age which was now above their average accuracy age, despite their initial assignment to the poorer comprehender group. Changes in accuracy age over the training period were minimal.
Relation of initial comprehension skill to discussion type Children had initially been categorized as poorer or better comprehenders. Because their comprehension status had changed by the end of the study, we investigated the relation of initial comprehension and discussion by comparing different Table 2 Post-test reading scores (months), and change (months) from pre-test, for better and poorer comprehenders in each pair and for trained vs. control groups: means and (in brackets) SD
Characteristic
Accuracy
Change
Comprehension
Change
Comprehension group Poorer Better
87.83 (9.0) 86.67 (19.6)
2.92 1.25
88.42 (12.6) 96.75 (16.9)
9.5 4.6
Mean trained group Control group
87.25 (15.0) 82.57 (12.4)
0.75 0.85
92.58 (15.2) 83.86 (12.6)
7.0 0.9
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Table 3 Number of utterances of each type for poorer and better comprehenders in Session 1: means and (in brackets) SD
Group
Metacognitive
Metalinguistic
Control
Evaluation
Poorer Better
7.91 (6.5) 7.73 (4.3)
6.27 (5.4) 6.27 (2.8)
12.00 (8.6) 10.00 (7.9)
2.45 (2.0) 2.27 (2.0)
Reading
Total talk
22.00 (8.3) 57.55 (22.3) 21.55 (12.2) 57.18 (23.8)
categories of talk in Session 1 only, based on the group assignment by initial comprehension score. The mean numbers of each category of utterance type is shown in Table 3. There were no significant differences between better and poorer comprehenders group in the main categories of talk type and comprehension skill, all Fs(1, 20) 1.
Relation of comprehension improvement to discussion type One might conclude from the overall training effect that the training was in general effective for better and poorer comprehenders. However, the levels of improvement were highly variable. The third aim of this study was to assess possible processes whereby peer discussion might foster increased metalinguistic awareness, and whether this was associated with greater improvements in comprehension. To do this, it is important to look at both children in a pair, because we would expect that being exposed to metalinguistic utterances, as well as expressing them oneself, may foster improvement. The next step therefore was to identify pairs that did and did not improve. Inspection of the improvement data suggested three clear categories: while poorer comprehenders, unsurprisingly, tended to improve more than better ones, in some pairs both children improved, in others there was only mixed improvement (one child improved, the other did not), and in other pairs neither child showed much change. The data fell reasonably neatly into four pairs in each of these three categories. The characteristics of these high, medium and low improvers are shown in Table 4. An ANOVA showed no significant age differences or pre-test comprehension differences between the three groups (both Fs(2, 21) 1), but the lower improvers tended to be poorer readers on the pre-test accuracy score (F(2, 21) 2.43, p 0.11), and a one-way ANOVA on accuracy scores showed that the low improvers were significantly different from the high improvers in this respect (LSD p 0.05). These data allow us to address the question of whether children who show greater levels of comprehension improvement were involved to a greater extent in metalinguistic discussion, and whether there were changes in such discussion over the first and last sessions. The amount of talk across the groups was very similar, meaning that the analyses were similar for absolute and proportional frequencies of different talk types. Absolute frequencies are reported here, as the more direct
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Table 4 Ages, pre-test scores and changes in accuracy and comprehension scores (in months) for high, medium and low improvers: means and (in brackets) SD
Improvement group
Age
Accuracy Pre-test
High (n 8) Medium (n 8) Low (n 8)
119.2 (5.9) 117.8 (5.9) 120.4 (6.2)
Change
94.9 (16.7) 90.2 (11.4) 80.9 (8.8)
0.9 4.5 0.3
Comprehension Pre-test 89.8 (18.5) 83.0 (6.7) 85.8 (6.4)
Change 15.6 5.2 0.9
Table 5 Mean number (and percentage) of utterances of each type across two training sessions by improvement group (high, medium, low)
High Metacognitive Metalinguistic Control Reading Total
15.88a (17%) 33.62 (35%) 17.13a (18%) 29.13a (30%) 95.76
Note. Means within a row with different superscripts
Medium 12.83a (11%) 26.83 (24%) 18.33a (16%) 43.17b (38%) 123.01 a, b, c
Low 24.17b (20%) 24.00 (20%) 31.67b (25%) 54.17c (44%) 112.16
are significantly different (LSD, p0.05).
measure of content of sessions. ‘Evaluation’ was so small a category (around 4% of the conversation) that it was omitted from the analyses. First, a mixed ANCOVA was performed, with improvement group (low, medium or high) between subjects, and talk category (metacognitive, metalinguistic, control and reading) and session (first or third) within subjects. Neale accuracy score was used as a covariate, since the improvement groups differed significantly on this variable. There were no significant main effects of improvement group, talk category or session, but a significant interaction between improvement group and talk category (F(6, 48) 5.65, p 0.001). The means summed across the two sessions for each talk category and each group are shown in Table 5. Metacognitive comments Low improvers made significantly more metacognitive comments than other groups, as shown in Table 5. One possibility is that this group, in particular in the first session, may have been commenting on their lack of understanding of the material. The metacognitive category included subcategories of utterances that expressed knowing or understanding (e.g., ‘I get it, you did it right’) and utterances indicating non-comprehension (e.g., ‘that’s wrong, I don’t get it’). A repeated measures ANOVA comparing the number of metacognitive ‘know’ and ‘don’t know’ 73 Downloaded from fla.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 10, 2010
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Table 6 Mean number (SD) of metalinguistic utterances in each improvement group in first and last training sessions
Improvement group High Medium Low
Session 1
Session 3
12.75 (2.5) 14.00 (2.8) 13.34 (2.9)
21.24 (2.6) 12.83 (2.9) 10.18 (3.0)
comments in Session 1, with improvement group between subjects, showed a main effect for improvement group, F(2, 17) 4.1, p 0.05. As in the analysis of both sessions, low improvers made a greater number of metacognitive comments overall, at 4.4 per pair, than medium improvers, at 1.6, and high improvers, at 2.0 per pair. Over all pairs, there was a tendency to make more ‘know’ comments than ‘don’t know’ comments, as shown by the significant main effect of comment type, F (1, 17) 6.07, p 0.025, with ‘know’ comments on average at 3.4 utterances per pair and ‘don’t know’ comments at only 1.9. Metalinguistic comments The absolute number of these comments did not differ significantly across improvement groups over both sessions combined. However, inspection of the data suggested that high improvers increased the number (and proportion) of such comments from the first to the third session. An ANCOVA on the number of metalinguistic comments, with improvement group between subjects and session within subjects, with accuracy score as a covariate, showed a significant interaction between group and session (F(2, 16) 4.16, p 0.05). The means, shown in Table 6, show that high improvers almost doubled the number of such comments in the third session, while the other two groups showed no increase at all (in fact, a slight drop). These are absolute numbers, and given the greater total number of utterances in the low improvers, this finding is even more striking. Unfortunately, even arcsine transformation of the data did not render a normal distribution to the proportional data to allow an ANCOVA to be done, but 6 of the 8 high improvers increased their absolute use of metalinguistic statements from session 1 to 3, compared with 3 of 6 medium improvers and only 2 of 6 low improvers. Our coding of metalinguistic utterances also differentiated between three subtypes of any utterance about the joke ambiguities: those that expressed only the meaning cued by the joke question, or only the meaning uncued by the joke question, or that mentioned both cued and uncued ambiguous meanings. For example, in the ‘sausage roll’ joke, a child might express just the cued meaning (‘you can eat a sausage roll’) or the uncued meaning (‘you can roll a sausage down the hill’), or both, as in ‘you can roll (uncued) a sausage roll (cued)’. We expected the last type of utterance, mentioning cued and uncued meanings, to be particularly associated with comprehension improvement, since it expresses a clear and direct contrast in meaning. We performed an analysis of the 5 different subcategories within the 74 Downloaded from fla.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 10, 2010
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metalinguistic category, including the three subtypes described above, and two further subtypes of more general metalinguistic comment or plays on words, not directly related to the crucial ambiguity. An ANOVA of the 5 subtypes of metalinguistic utterances in session 3, with improvement group between subjects, showed a significant difference between groups in the number of statements mentioning both cued and uncued meanings (F(2, 21) 3.62, p 0.05). High improvers showed an average of 1.25 such utterances in session 3, compared with 1.0 for medium improvers and 0.13 for non-improvers, and this was the most marked difference of all subcategories. Furthermore, the correlation between individual comprehension improvement and number of such utterances in session 3 was significant (r(21) 0.49, p 0.02, 2-tailed). Control/reading from screen As shown in Table 5, low improvers had more discussion than the other groups about the mechanics of the task, both in terms of control utterances and in reading from the screen. The latter difference can be attributed at least in part to the fact that the low improvers tended to be poorer readers, and one child often re-read or corrected the other.
DISCUSSION The results show that children’s post-test comprehension after the riddle training was significantly higher than the no-treatment control group. This suggests that discussion of ambiguity in joking riddles might be a useful training aid, although more work is needed to compare training with different forms of treatment, in addition to just a no-treatment control. The results also suggest a link between children’s comprehension skill and sensitivity to ambiguity, which deserves further investigation. However, the overall effect of training is less important than the investigation of the notable individual differences: some children improved markedly while others did not improve at all. It is clear that some children benefited more than others from the training, and we asked what might predict improvement. One possibility is that children who improved more in comprehension were already disposed to be more receptive to metalinguistic reflection, so may show greater use of such comments from the first session. This was not supported in the results, because there were no significant differences between high and low improvers in metalinguistic talk in Session 1. On the other hand, if the ambiguous material presented is more crucial in prompting such discussion than some stable internal variable such as metalinguistic ‘readiness’, one would expect such discussion to increase from the first to the third session. This is in fact what we found. The results suggest that metalinguistic awareness, as indexed by utterances about meanings, may be important in the process of comprehension gain. By the third training session, those who showed high comprehension improvement were making almost twice the number of metalinguistic utterances compared with their previous session and compared with the other groups. In particular, high improvers were more likely than other groups to mention both cued and uncued meanings in 75 Downloaded from fla.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 10, 2010
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the third training session utterances. Such utterances, although quite infrequent, were associated with high levels of improvement. We cannot rule out the fact that the different materials used in sessions 1 and 3 might be responsible for differences between sessions. However, it would not make sense to vary materials across sessions, because we provided easier materials in the earlier sessions for pedagogical reasons. The fact that we found differences between subgroups of children in their use of the same material suggests that the differences are not purely a function of different session content. It was notable that metacognitive utterances were more common in low improvers than higher improvers. Although some studies have highlighted the importance of metacognitive awareness in developing text comprehension (e.g., Garner, 1987), there is evidence that children often overestimate their understanding (Ruffman, 1996), and the current study is consistent with the idea that overestimating one’s comprehension could hamper comprehension improvement. Some studies have shown that good comprehenders show better metacognitive awareness than poor comprehenders (Garner, 1987), and in some circumstances, metacognitive training may be useful for improving poor comprehension (e.g., Palincsar & Brown, 1984). However, there are two caveats to this. First, it is clear that a high number of metacognitive comments, even those that suggested understanding, are not a good indication that children understand the task as intended: children’s judgements of their own understanding may not be accurate. Second, one needs to bear in mind the possible social function of such comments: when children are finding a task challenging, one response may be to boost oneself by claiming understanding. Thus, metacognitive comments cannot be taken at face value as indicating understanding or lack of it, particularly in a group situation. We would expect that productive discussions, and comprehension improvement, might be predicted both by content of discussion and pre-existing characteristics of children. Above we show several associations between comprehension improvement and content of discussions. The only one of the pre-existing characteristics we measured that predicted comprehension change was the poor reading accuracy of the lowimprovement group. Poor reading may well explain why this group did more reading from the screen, and this reading may have occurred at the expense of discussion. Overall, the results suggest that supporting children to articulate multiple meanings is associated with improvements in comprehension. Joking riddles provide an excellent example of how different contexts support or cue different meanings, and this point is underlined by the association between comprehension improvement and utterances expressing both meanings of an ambiguity. The ways in which children expressed such utterances combining cued and uncued meanings suggest an impressive facility with language, and this was shown across a variety of different ambiguities. Examples include: spotted – ‘cos leopards they have spots and it’s cos they get spotted’ ( seen); serve fish – ‘he’s a fish and he likes to eat fish’; bed socks – ‘you wear them to bed and the bed’s wearing them’; and pinch – ‘you can pinch someone on the leg or you can pinch sweets without paying’. The joke context helps in building on children’s existing appreciation, even if it is unarticulated, of ‘getting’ a joke that involves being able to see two different meanings. The strength of a joke is that it cues a particular context to give meaning to a phrase, but the answer 76 Downloaded from fla.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 10, 2010
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requires a different context to be understood. As Casteel (1997) suggests, it may not be enough just for children to know ‘different meanings of words’: they have to be able to see how particular interpretations are required to fit different contexts.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The analysis of this work was partly supported by funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UK). I am very grateful to John Bradwell for collaboration in producing Joke City, to Pat George for support in coding and analysis, and to the children and schools who took part in the research.
REFERENCES Bonitatibus G. J. & Beal C. R. (1996). Finding new meanings: Children’s recognition of interpretive ambiguity in text. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 62, 131–150. Cain, K. (1999). Ways of reading: How knowledge and use of strategies are related to reading comprehension. British Journal of Child Psychology, 17, 293–309. Cain, K., Oakhill, J., Barnes, M. & Bryant, P. (2001). Comprehension skill, inference-making ability and their relation to knowledge. Memory and Cognition, 29, 850–859. Casteel, M. (1997). Resolving interpretive ambiguity in text: Children’s generation of multiple interpretations. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 64, 396–424. Doherty, M. (2000). Children’s understanding of homonymy: Metalinguistic awareness and false belief. Journal of Child Language, 27, 367–392. Doherty, M. (2004). Children’s difficulty in learning homonyms. Journal of Child Language, 31, 203–214. Fitzpatrick, H. & Hardman, M. (2000). Mediated activity in the primary classroom: Girls, boys and computers. Learning and Instruction, 10, 431–446. Fuchs, D., Fuchs, L. S., Mathes, P. G. & Simmons, D. C. (1997). Peer-assisted learning strategies: Making classrooms more responsive to diversity. American Educational Research Journal, 34, 174–206. Garner, R. (1987). Metacognition and reading comprehension. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Gernsbacher, M. A. (1990). Language comprehension as structure building. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Hirsh-Pasek, K., Gleitman, L. R. & Gleitman, H. (1978). What did the brain say to the mind? A study of the detection and report of ambiguity by young children. In A. Sinclair, R. J. Jarvella & W. J. M. Levelt (Eds), The child’s conception of language (pp. 97–132). New York: Springer. King, A. (1990). Enhancing peer interaction and learning in the classroom through reciprocal peer questioning. American Educational Research Journal, 27, 664–687. Lee, E., Torrance, N. & Olson, D. (2001). Young children and the say/mean distinction: Verbatim and paraphrase recognition in narrative and nursery rhyme contexts. Journal of Child Language, 28, 531–543. Long, D., Seely, M. R. & Oppy, B. J. (1999). The strategic nature of less-skilled readers’ suppression problems. Discourse Processes, 27, 281–302. Mahoney, D. L. & Mann, V. A. (1992). Using children’s humor to clarify the relationship between linguistic awareness and early reading ability. Cognition, 45, 163–186.
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Manion, V. & Alexander, J. M. (1997). The benefits of peer collaboration on strategy use, metacognitive casual attribution, and recall. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 67, 268–289. McNamara, D. (2004). SERT: Self-explanation reading training. Discourse Processes, 38, 1–30. Neale, M. D. (1989). The Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (2nd ed., revised). London: Macmillan Education. Oakhill, J., Yuill, N. & Donaldson, M. (1990). Understanding of “because” in skilled and less-skilled text comprehenders. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 8, 401–410. Olson, D. (1996). Toward a psychology of literacy: On the relations between speech and writing. Cognition, 60, 83–104. Palincsar, A. S. & Brown, A. L. (1984). Reciprocal teaching of comprehension-fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities. Cognition and Instruction, 1, 117–175. Robinson, E. J. & Robinson, W. P. (1983). Children’s uncertainty about the interpretation of ambiguous messages. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 36, 81–96. Ruffman, T. (1996). Reassessing children’s comprehension-monitoring skills. In C. Cornoldi & J. Oakhill (Eds), Children reading comprehension: Processes and intervention (pp. 33–67). Mahwah, NJ : Erlbaum. Shultz, T. R. (1974). Development of the appreciation of riddles. Child Development, 45, 100–105. Shultz, T. R. & Horibe, F. (1974). Development of the appreciation of verbal jokes. Developmental Psychology, 10, 13–20. Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher mental processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; (works originally published 1930, 1933, 1935). Yuill, N. (1997). A funny thing happened on the way to the classroom: Jokes, riddles and metalinguistic awareness in understanding and improving poor comprehension in children. In C. Cornoldi & J. Oakhill (Eds), Reading comprehension disabilities: Processes and intervention (pp. 193–220). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Yuill, N. (1998). Reading and riddling: The role of riddle appreciation in understanding and improving poor text comprehension in children. Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive, 17 (Special Issue on Language Play), 313–342. Yuill, N. & Bradwell, J. (1998). The laughing PC: How a software riddle package can help children’s reading comprehension (Paper presented at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference, Brighton, 26–29 March). Proceedings of the BPS, 6, 119. Yuill, N. & George, P. (2006). Coding children’s conversations for metalinguistic and metacognitive utterances. Unpublished manuscript, University of Sussex, UK. Yuill, N. & Oakhill, J. (1988). Effects of inference awareness training on poor reading comprehension. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2, 33–45. Yuill, N. & Oakhill, J. (1991). Children’s problems in text comprehension: An experimental investigation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
APPENDIX Joking riddles used in each of the three sessions Level 1 How do you make a sausage roll? Push it down a hill. Do you know what happened to the paper shop? It blew away. Why is it easy for elephants to go on holiday? They always have trunks with them.
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What do you get if you cross a sheep and a kangaroo? A woolly jumper. Please put the kettle on. Sorry, I don’t wear kettles. How do you make an apple puff? Chase it round the garden. Level 3 How do you make a lemon drop? Push it off the table. How do you make a band stand? Take their chairs away. What has four wheels and flies? A bin wagon. Do you want a pocket calculator? No thanks, I know how many pockets I’ve got. Why do birds in their nest always agree? They don’t want to fall out. What do you call an elephant that flies? A jumbo jet. Level 6 Does this restaurant serve fish? Yes, what would you like, Mr Fish? Why do leopards never escape from the zoo? Because they are always spotted. Why was the crab arrested? Because he kept pinching things. How do you stop the bed getting cold at night? Put bedsocks on. Why did the teacher have her eyes tested? Because she had bad pupils. What type of clothing enjoys sport? Running shorts?
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Dr Nicola Yuill School of Psychology, Pevensey 1, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK E:
[email protected]
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