During narration, speakers constantly choose appropriate referential forms (nominals or pronominals). Children may engage in this reference marking differently than adults. Discourse- or listener-oriented approaches make different predictions about referential behaviour in cognitively demanding situations: the first predicts a higher number of…

Although a considerable number of studies have shown D(eterminer) elements, i.e. determiners and pronominal clitics, to be particularly vulnerable to impairment in monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), little is known about the use of appropriate or/and grammatically correct referring expressions in the children's…

This research analyzed adequacy of referential expressions in the narratives of bilingual and monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical language development (TLD), aiming to shed light on the relative contribution of morpho-syntactic, discourse-pragmatic, and semantic constraints. Narratives were collected from 51…

This study investigates the effects of early second-language (L2) acquisition on introduction of characters in narrative discourse by comparing 5- and 7-year-old monolingual (first-language [L1] = Turkish) and bilingual (L1 = Turkish, L2 = English) children. Turkish does not have a grammaticalized article system like English which enables to…

This study investigates the referential choice of Mandarin-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The data consist of narratives from 16 children with ASD and 16 typically-developing (TD) children. The narratives were elicited using the wordless picture book "Frog, where are you?" Participants' referential expressions…

Prepositional phrases (PPs) are considered an important feature of mature written expression. However, little is known about the development of PPs during the school years. The study examined the use of PPs in 160 narrative and expository texts, written by Hebrew-users in grades 4, 7, and 11, and adults. PPs were identified, counted, and…

This study considered the linguistic forms used by 63 English-speaking Canadian children from kindergarten to second grade (ages 5;6-8;8) to introduce, maintain reference to, and reintroduce primary and secondary characters throughout their narratives The expected referring forms were used more frequently for the best-matching referential…

This study considered the adequacy of references used by children to introduce, maintain, and reintroduce characters in complex narratives involving multiple characters. Sixty-three English-speaking Canadian children from kindergarten to second grade (M age 7.0 years) told two multi-episode stories from wordless picture books. Analyses considered…