Abstract
Narrative production draws upon linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic skills, and is subject to substantial individual differences. This study aimed to characterise the development of narrative production in late childhood and to assess whether children’s cumulative experience of reading fiction is associated with individual differences in narrative language skills. One-hundred-and-twenty-five 9- to 12-year-old children told a story from a wordless picture book, and their narratives were coded for syntactic, semantic and discourse-pragmatic features. The grammatical complexity and propositional content of children’s narratives increased with age between 9 and 12 years, while narrative cohesion, coherence and use of mental state terms were stable across the age range. Measures of fiction reading experience were positively correlated with several indices of narrative production quality and predicted unique variance in narrative macrostructure after controlling for individual differences in vocabulary knowledge, word reading accuracy and theory of mind. These findings are discussed in terms of the continued importance of ‘book language’ as part of the language input beyond early childhood.
Highlights
The ability to construct narratives, both fictional and factual, is a key aspect of oral language competence
The current study examines linguistic, semantic and pragmatic features of picture-book elicited oral narratives produced by 9- to 12-year-old children
Our second aim was to establish whether children who read more fictional texts for pleasure produce more sophisticated narratives and, if so, whether this relation can be explained by individual differences in vocabulary knowledge, reading ability and/or theory of mind
Summary
The ability to construct narratives, both fictional and factual, is a key aspect of oral language competence. The development of narrative production skills in early childhood has been extensively studied from an emergent literacy perspective Less work has focused on narrative production in late childhood and adolescence, a period of steady development of pragmatic language and social cognition (Nippold, 2000). The current study examines linguistic, semantic and pragmatic features of picture-book elicited oral narratives produced by 9- to 12-year-old children. Since children within this age range vary widely in how much they read for pleasure (Nippold et al, 2005), we assess whether children with more cumulative experience of reading narrative fiction show advantages in narrative competence
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