Study of understanding of contradictions of comic content by grade school students

Abstract

© 2014 A.S.M. Priyadharson et al. Annotation: Tasks with comic content are especially difficult for the thinking of children, as they have to resolve the contradiction and inconsistence with their expectations. The article provides an analysis of cognitive mechanisms of understanding comic texts; emphasizes the role of dialectic thinking at resolution of problematic and contradictory situations, statement of colliding properties and relations of an object. The undertaken research is oriented to revealing the acts of dialectic thinking, which participate in the understanding of comic texts by grade school students. The experimental research involved a set of methods for studying the acts of dialectic thinking of grade school students: The Opposites methodology; the study of dialectic act of unification; the methodology of the research of the content seriation; Dialectic Stories. During the research, the students demonstrated the ability to change the habitual system of explanation stating connections between pictures in a series in the reverse order, thus turning the original sense of the situation represented by the pictures into opposite. The grade school students turned out to be able to carry out transition from one alternative to another; to go beyond the context of the existing situation by getting a new angle on the subject. It was revealed that grade school students faced difficulties in finding the colliding relations of an object, a substance. Their sensitivity to contradictions was studied using the Coping Humor Scale and the Pictures Arrangement subtest by D. Wechsler. The inability of grade school students to realize and restore the internal mental content of the character, his thoughts, motives, goals hindered the understanding of the humorous sense of the situation, led to misunderstanding of the cause and effect relationship, on which the narrative events were based. The correlative study confirmed our assumption that dialectic-thinking acts are involved in the understanding of comic, contradictory situations: The acts of unification, content seriation and alternative replacement.