The development of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) has no doubt contributed to prompting a renewed interest in children's narratives. This carefully controlled test of narrative abilities elicits a rich set of measures spanning multiple linguistic domains and their interaction, including lexis, morphosyntax,…

This paper argues that in interpreting literary pieces, language and literature should team up for their mutual benefit. Based on this assumption, this study explores the interface between language and literature by examining along stylistic lines the flash fiction piece "When It's A Grey November In Your Soul" written by Cristina…

This study examined age-related changes in narrative speech of 79 adults aged 40-91 who told stories from their pictorial representations. Quantity, information content and cohesion of narratives were analysed using a detailed transcription and codification system. We carried out a LISREL analysis to study relationships between narrative…

Based on the theory that a story's coherence depends directly on the causal cohesiveness of the story's individual events, this paper describes (1) a process by which readers use causal reasoning to connect events, (2) what memory representations result from this reasoning, and (3) the implications of test data on causal reasoning. Following a…

A computer program devised to analyze text by the use of case grammar is described. The program tests a text against the expectations created by a narrative situation and by the connotative values in the narrator's choice of words. It determines spatial concepts attached to various English words and analyzes the spatial relationships in syntactic…

Presents sample passages from children's readers to show deficiencies in the coherence of such texts, particularly in the way they relate to accompanying illustrations. (GT)