Abstract

We examined whether or not question-answering aided the construction of cohesive and coherent narratives. Eighty-two preschoolers completed two tasks using pictures depicting stories: question-answering and narratives. The order of the tasks was manipulated within participants. Narratives elicited after questions were more coherent than those produced before the question-answering task; In contrast, there were no differences between scores for cohesion and the question answers in the different order conditions. In addition, working memory explained greater gains more from questions. Results are discussed regarding the interactional role of questions and the facilitative effect they have on focusing attention to the task.