Author:

Abstract

[The Comprehension of Simple Stories through Successive Summaries]

Seventy-two subjects in four experimental groups summarized two stones: «Cirele Island» and «The Old Farmer and his Stubborn Animals», taken from Thorndyke (1977). In the first group, the subjects summarized the original stories; in the second group, each subject read the two summaries of one subject of the first group and summarized them. This procedure was repeated for all the groups. The analysis of these summaries shows: 1. that the propositions which are present in a summary correspond to the important parts of the story, m the high level of the hierarchy; 2. that the probabilities that one proposition is in the (Rn + 1) summary if it is present in the (Rn) preceding summary stay high with the successive summaries for the high-level propositions and that those of the low-level propositions diminish progressively: right from the first summary, the subjects seem to have determined the propositions which give coherence to the story; 3. that the new propositions arc a synthesis of several propositions of the story. Thus, our results show that to summarize a story is to elaborate a new structure containing fewer inferred propositions.