Abstract Summary/Description
Young children's linguistic comprehension, often referred to as narrative comprehension, is typically assessed through story comprehension and is widely recognized as a critical precursor to future reading success. Assessing and describing kindergarteners' story comprehension skills are vital for improving pre-literacy evaluations and fostering their learning and developmental outcomes. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate 5-year-old kindergartener’s story comprehension skills in a detailed way by considering their gender and specific components of implicit and explicit comprehension skills such as identifying the problem, outcome resolution of the story or feelings of the protagonists. The participants consist of 147 (74 female, 73 male) 5 year-old kindergarteners from the northwestern region of Turkiye. Over the course of four weeks, one picture book was read each week with the children in groups, in different orders. Following each reading session, the children's story comprehension skills were evaluated using the Narrative Comprehension Task developed by Paris and Paris (2003). The highlighting results suggested that kindergarteners show the greatest success in identifying the emotions of characters, while the component they show the least success in is repeating the dialogues between characters. In addition, although there is no statistically significant difference between genders in regarding overall explicit and implicit story comprehension skills of kindergarteners, it is observed that females outperformed males in terms of their ability to define story characters and initiating event of the story (ps< .05). Keywords: story comprehension, gender, implicit comprehension, implicit comprehension
