While it is established that parental "wh"-questions, as a high-quality language input, are associated with child language outcome, less is known about the role of children's "wh"-questions in their language development. This study examines whether children's "wh"-questions during a dinnertime conversation are…

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…

Sentences produced by children and adults in telling stories are analyzed, with particular emphasis on developmental trends in sentence length, the degree of cohesion between clauses, and the internal coherence of sentence content. Subjects for the study were 10 adults and 60 Japanese children in six different age groups. Each subject was…

Discusses children's concepts about stories, by examining interview responses. (AA)

Primary school children, after viewing a silent film, were asked to narrate a segment of the film and recount its events both as a news story and as an embellished story. The results indicate that primary school children have only nascent ability to apply genre knowledge to school language tasks. (55 references) (Author/JL)

Developed taxonomy of eight types of negation found in children's narratives, and examined children's personal narratives and narratives elicited by picture books. Found most frequent negation to be reference to actions that did not happen. Younger children used negation more than older children, and negation occurred more frequently in personal…

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…

Noting that children's talk makes some of their thinking visible and thereby provides a ready tool for early childhood teachers, this chapter focuses on the process of language acquisition. The chapter provides a historical context for language in early childhood education, discussing the nature of language and its acquisition, the development of…

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…

Examines the nature of thematization and thematic progression in children's narrative styles, in order to draw some conclusions regarding the acquisition of textual skills. (AM)

Focuses on the narrative function to show how children can build on another speaker's turns in conversation and can build on their own utterances as they speak. Analyzes children's dialogs and narratives to highlight the primacy of the oral language arts as they are enacted in daily conversation and play. (HTH)

Examines a corpus of narratives produced by preschool children, and focuses on differences among the three age groups with respect to: (1) complexity, (2) the relationship between story elements and the discursive context, (3) relationship between story elements and extralinguistic context, and (4) shaping of the narrative as story and as part of…

Reports the results of a study showing that one stylistic feature, the inclusion of connectives other than "and/then" is a good predictor of explanation in five- to ten-year-olds, but a straightforward lack of linguistic resources is not necessarily what limits older children's achievement of explanatory narrative. (HTH)

This paper examines children's early attempts at describing events absent in space and time, referred to as the "reportative function." The first part of the paper offers some explanations for the late emergence of the reportative function in young children's speech. Part two presents examples of children's attempts to report past events…

The literature on how children begin understanding subjectivity and point of view in fictional stories is considered. Examination of the oral stories of a five-year-old child indicated the ability to depict the beliefs, intentions, feelings, and perceptions of the story characters. Implications for assessment and interventions to help children…