Young children's oral narration typically progresses from telling disordered events to production of well-sequenced stories. To investigate how this development is supported and whether effects of support extend to literacy, 59 mother-child dyads from low-income family backgrounds were studied longitudinally. Maternal verbal input to narration was…

Investigated the role of parental interaction styles on children's developing skill at providing contextual orientation in personal experience narratives. Eighteen monthly narratives were elicited from toddlers. The children's increasing skill at independently providing context about when and where was correlated with mothers' frequency of using…

Describes the Narrative Assessment Profile, a comprehensive discourse-analysis measure for evaluating topic maintenance, event sequencing, explicitness, referencing, conjunctive cohesion, and fluency. Clinical implications for the assessment and intervention of narrative discourse in school-age children are discussed. (Author/DB)

Explores the narratives produced by children 3 1/2 to 9 1/2 years of age in a seminaturalistic setting and assesses the adequacy of the children's orientation to context. (Author/MP)

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 analysis of the structure of children's narratives deals with material gathered from 96 children, aged 3 1/2 to 9 1/2 years, in conversations about events in which they were personally involved. Elements of the narratives and the structural relationship of these elements are examined. Three elements are discerned: (1) chronological…

This paper provides information concerning preschool narrative development in typically developing North American children, stressing previously documented links between early narrative skills and literacy development. Methods are provided for assessing narrative skills of language-impaired children. The methods involve eliciting from the children…

Drawing attention to different models of storytelling, this paper summarizes information about specific aspects of children's oral narrative structure in several cultures and explores some implications these aspects have for multicultural education programs that include stories. The paper first describes a methodology for trying to understand…