Causal Cohesion and Story Coherence
Tom Trabasso, Tom Secco, Paul Van Den Broek · 2026
In reading or listening to narratives such as stories, what do children acquire? In terms of content, they may acquire knowledge about explanation, about human personal problem solving, about social interaction, about human intentionality, about feelings, about values, about morals, about myths, and about history. However, in order to acquire this knowledge, they must understand the individual events portrayed in the story, and they must organize and store these events in a memory representation. This representation allows them to retain the information and draw upon this knowledge for other purposes. The extent to which they find this prerequisite understanding and the construction of a representation easy to accomplish is directly dependent upon the coherence of the story in question. This coherence depends directly upon how potentially cohesive, logically and causally, the individual story events are to one another. The more cohesive the elements, the more easily the child will find relationships between the events and construct a coherent representation.