| Abstract: | It has often been demonstrated that adults are more likely to remember important text elements than less important elements –“levels effect”. It is not clear whether the same effect exists in children because the evidence is inconsistent. Most of the existing studies with children can be criticised for failing to include adult subjects as well as children, thereby making it impossible to determine whether the observed differences between adults and children reflect genuine differences in processing or just the effects of strategies for coping with the specific texts selected for the children. The present study partly replicated a study that found no evidence for a levels effect in children (Baumann, 1981) with a group of adults. With one passage stronger evidence for a levels effect was found with the adults in our study than was found with children, whereas with the second passage no evidence for a levels effect was found in either study. It was argued that this finding suggested that there were differences between adults and children in the extent to which they engaged in the type of processing that resulted in levels effects, but also that texts differed in the degree to which they induced this type of processing, and that the latter factor had to be taken into account in developmental studies. |
