Facilitative effects of illustration activity on prose learning have been previously established for young (first grade) children in a listening task. The present study tested for illustration effects with passages of varying complexity and length. Positive effects were found for long and short passages (100 vs. 50 words) that were either simple (one locational setting) or complex (two settings). The pattern of results for cued and free recall suggested that illustration facilitates individual sentence comprehension more than passage integration for these children. Analysis of subject-constructed illustrations showed a clear relationship between illustration content and passage recall.
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