This study investigates effects of age on character introductions in the oral narratives of seventy-two monolingual Swedish-speaking four- to six-year-olds, comparing results from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN; Gagarina "et al.," 2012, 2015), and the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI; Schneider…

This study examined interaction between non-referential gesture and discourse-structuring linguistic devices in the development of metanarrative ability. Specifically, the development of the interaction between beat gestures and all metanarrative devices was analyzed in 9 children aged 5-6, 8-9, 11-12, and in 3 adults. Subjects viewed a cartoon…

Dialogue from 30-minute samples from "Sesame Street" and "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" was coded for grammar, content, and discourse. Grammatical analysis used the LINGQUEST computer-assisted language assessment program (Mordecai, Palen, and Palmer 1982). Content coding was based on categories developed by Rice (1984) and…

Communication breakdowns occurring in the speech of seven language learning-disabled children (aged 9-11) were examined in conversation and narration and compared to normal peers. Length of communication unit and rate of communication breakdowns per communication unit were greater in narration than conversation compared to controls. No differences…

Personal event and fictional narratives are compared across 36 normal children in 2 language-ability (one high, one low) groups using episodic analysis. Findings suggest that narrative structures for personal event narratives and fictional stories may follow different developmental paths, and that differences in productive language abilities…

The aim of this study was to determine universal versus language-specific aspects of children's ability to organize cohesive anaphoric relations in discourse. Analyses examine narratives produced on the basis of two picture sentences by subjects of four ages (preschoolers, 7-year olds, 10-year olds, and adults) in four languages: English, German,…

The storytelling narratives produced by four children, namely, two low-income African-American first-graders and two White middle-class first-graders, were examined using a text analysis technique that organizes lines into the groupings referred to as stanzas. The narratives were based on the viewing of a film. Subtle differences were found in the…