Mental representations of audiovisual text in children aged 7 to 12

This dataset stems from an experiment where we examined how auditory text, audiovisual text with static pictures, and audiovisual text with dynamic pictures affected text comprehension in seven- to twelve-year-old children (N = 108). Text comprehension was operationalized using a tripartite theory which takes the text surface, the textbase, and the situation model into account. Children listened to twelve narrative texts with six sentences each, which were presented in one of three formats: auditory only, auditory with static pictures, auditory with animated pictures. In the following sentence recognition task, sentences were presented either as originals or as changes on the surface (paraphrases), textbase (meaning changes) or situation model (situation changes) level of text representation. For each level of representation, we computed separate A' signal detection measures, with non-detection of changes at one level considered as false alarms, and acceptance of changes at lower (i.e., more superficial) levels as hits.