Las relaciones retóricas y la memoria operativa en la comprensión textual de la población infantil: el desentrañamiento anafórico

Francisco Gutierrez-Martinez

Spain

Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia image/svg+xml

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Accepted: 2025-04-08

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Published: 2025-07-25

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4995/rlyla.2025.22350
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Keywords:

rhetorical relationship, working memory, textual comprehension, child population, anaphora, pronoun

Supporting agencies:

This research was not funded

Abstract:

The present study seeks to demonstrate that textual comprehension is linked to the unraveling of rhetorical relationships and that the complexity of the hierarchy derived from rhetorical relationships is determined by the development of working memory (WM).  Furthermore, the idea is defended that the more rhetorical relationships the subject can establish, the greater its capacity to determine the referent of a pronominal element. To demonstrate this thesis, we started with a child population (fourth and sixth grade children); These were evaluated on the different components of the WM, their capacity for anaphoric resolution and the rhetorical complexity of their texts. The results show that short-term working memory and long-term working memory proposed by Ericsson and Kintsch (1995) are predictors of the memory of the two main types of rhetorical relationships (coordinated and subordinate), although in an asymmetric way. Likewise, it was shown that, indeed, the subjects who established more rhetorical relationships (coordinated or subordinate) were those who established the antecedent of the rhetorical element with a greater degree of accuracy.

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