Previous studies of narrative development based on wordless picture stories indicate that before 7-8 years most children provide descriptive narratives with little inferential content such as explanations and attribution of mental states to the story characters. These components find greater expression in studies where children participated in…

This article examines the place occupied by maps in children's picturebooks. After a brief overview of the different roles that are assigned to maps in children's books, the article considers five French picturebooks--Warja Lavater's "Le petit chaperon rouge" (1965), Olivier Douzou and Isabelle Simon's "L'autobus numéro 33"…

This paper reports on an original study designed to investigate age-related change in the way French children produce speech during oral narrative, considering both prosodic parameters -- speaking rate and duration of the prosodic speech unit -- and linguistic structure. Eighty-five French children aged four to eleven years were asked to tell a…

Revisions in writing aim at text improvement. Literature has shown that revision activity differs between novice and experienced writers. Our ultimate goal is to understand how children and adolescents develop the capacity to shift perspectives from language producer to language recipient -- a prerequisite ability to successful revision. In this…

Papers on language research in this volume include the following: "Temporalite en francais de France. Differences dans la conceptualisation du temps et son expression dans un texte narratif oral" ("Differences in the Conceptualization of Time and Its Expression in Oral Narratives") (Natalia Dankova); "La traduction des…

The acquisition of narrative competence in French by an Arabic-speaking migrant worker in interactions with target language speakers was explored, with hypotheses formed about the polyfunctional uses of certain forms to mark the chronology of events in the narrative or to introduce quoted speech. (Author/CB)

Written by history students at Gary High School, Gary, Texas, this issue includes two articles relevant to East Texas history. "Mission Dolores and Jim Corbin," (Moss Heaton and others) is a summary of material presented by Professor James Corbin about the early Spanish presence in East Texas. The first attempt at setting up a mission…