The development of narrative skills in monolingual Swedish-speaking children aged 4 to 9: a longitudinal study.

Josefin Lindgren

doi:10.1017/s030500092100057x

Abstract

This longitudinal study investigated the development of oral narrative skills in monolingual Swedish-speaking children (N = 17). The MAIN Cat/Dog stories were administered at four timepoints between age 4 and 9. Different narrative aspects were found to develop differently. In story comprehension, the children performed high already at T1 (4;4) and were at ceiling at T2 (5;10), whereas story structure developed significantly until T4 (9;4). Narrative length and syntactic complexity reached a plateau at T3 (7;4). Referent introduction was not mastered until T4. The results suggest that general conclusions regarding the development of narrative skills depend on the specific aspects studied.

Highlights

Introduction and backgroundPicture-based elicited narratives are controlled language samples which can be used to give a fairly ecologically valid assessment of children’s language skills (e.g., Botting, 2002)
Narrative data can be analyzed in various ways, and provide information about various aspects of children’s language skills, such as their ability to structure complex discourse (Fiestas & Peña, 2004) or to narrate how story characters think and feel (Burris & Brown, 2014)
The results for NARRATIVE LENGTH showed that the children produced significantly shorter narratives at T1 and T2 than at the subsequent timepoints, but that the increase from T3 to T4 was not significant

Summary

Introduction

Introduction and backgroundPicture-based elicited narratives are controlled language samples which can be used to give a fairly ecologically valid assessment of children’s language skills (e.g., Botting, 2002). Narrative data can be analyzed in various ways (see Pavlenko, 2008 for an overview), and provide information about various aspects of children’s language skills, such as their ability to structure complex discourse (Fiestas & Peña, 2004) or to narrate how story characters think and feel (Burris & Brown, 2014). For these reasons, studies of children’s narratives have become increasingly popular in recent years, with both monolingual and bilingual children speaking a number of different languages being investigated.

Methods

Results

Conclusion