This study examines how French children of 6, 9, and 11 years use referring expressions for reference maintenance in narratives elicited in two situations: children and their interlocutor were looking at a picture book together (mutual knowledge) or the inter locutor was blindfolded (no mutual knowledge). Local coreference has a strong impact on the selection of pronouns (coreferential) vs. nominals (non-coreferential) at all ages and in both situations. However, children from 9 years on produce more pronouns in the absence of mutual knowledge and the extent to which children mark story structure varies as a function of age and situation. Regardless of situation, 6-year-olds mark boundaries across successive pictures (external structure) and episodes (internal structure) by means of nominals. Although a similar pattern can be observed at other ages in the mutual knowledge condition, it gradually disappears with increasing age in the absence of mutual knowledge. It is concluded that discourse-internal functions of referring expressions are a late development characterized by the increasing impact of coreference, which gradually overrides other factors, as children learn to rely maximally on discourse cohesive relations in the absence of mutual knowledge.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Applebee, A.N. (1978). The Child's Concept of Story ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
2.
Bamberg, M.G.W. (1987). The Acquisition of Narratives : Learning to Use Language (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter ).
3.
Bamberg, M. & Marchman, V. (1990). What holds a narrative together? The linguistic encoding of episode boundaries. Pragmatics, 4, 58-121.
4.
— (1994). Foreshadowing and wrapping up in narrative. In R. Berman & D. Slobin (eds), Different Ways of Relating Events in Narrative: A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum).
5.
Bennett-Kastor, T. (1983). Noun phrases and coherence in child narrative . Journal of Child Language, 10, 135-49.
6.
Berman, R. & Slobin, D. (eds) (1994). Different Ways of Relating Events in Nariative: A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study ( Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum).
7.
Brown, R. (1973). A First Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
8.
Chafe, W. (1976). Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics and point of view. In C. N. Li (ed.), Subject and Topic (New York: Academic Press), 25-55.
9.
Charvillat, A. & Kail, M. (1991). The status of 'canonical SVO sentences' in French: a developmental study of the on-line processing of dislocated sentences. Journal of Child Language, 18, 591-608.
10.
De Weck, G. (1991). La cohésion dans les narrations d' enfants (Neuchâtel: Delachaux & Niestlé ).
11.
De Weck, G. & Schneuwly, B. (1994). Anaphoric procedures in four types of texts written by children. Discourse Processes, 17, 465-70.
12.
Emslie, H.C. & Stevenson, R.J. (1981). Pre-school children's use of the articles in definite and indefinite referring expressions. Journal of Child Language, 8, 313-28.
13.
Espéret, E. (1991). The development and role of narrative schema storytelling . In G. Piéraut-Le Bonniec & M. Dolitsky (eds), Language Bases Discourse Bases (Amsterdam: John Benjamins ).
14.
Fayol, M. (1985). Le récit et sa construction une approche de psychologie cognitive (Neuchâtel: Delachaux & Niestlé).
15.
— (1991). Stories: a psycholinguistic and ontogenetic approach to the acquisition of narrative abilities. In G. Piéraut-Le Bonniec & M. Dolitsky (eds), Language Bases... Discourse Bases ( Amsterdam: John Benjamins).
16.
French, L.A. & Nelson, K. (1985). Children's Acquisition of Relational Terms Some Ifs, Ors, and Buts (New York. Springer Verlag).
17.
Gopnik, M. (1989). The development of text competence. In M. E. Conte, J. S. Petöfi & E. Sozer (eds), Text and Discourse Connectedness (Amsterdam: John Benjamins).
18.
Halliday, M.A.K. & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English (London : Longmans Group).
19.
Hickmann, M. (1980). Creating referents in discourse: a developmental analysis of linguistic cohesion. In J. Kreiman & E. Ojeda (eds), Papers from the Parasession on Pronouns and Anaphora ( ChicagoLinguistic Society), 192-203.
20.
— (1987). The pragmatics of reference in child language: some issues in developmental theory. In M. Hickmann (ed.), Social and Functional Approaches to Language and Thought (Orlando, FL: Academic Press).
21.
Hickmann, M. (1991a). The development of discourse cohesion: some functional and cross-linguistic issues. In G. Piéraut-Le Bonniec & M. Dolitsky (eds), Language Bases .. Discourse Bases (Amsterdam: John Benjamins).
22.
— (1991b). Review of The Acquisition of Narratives. Learning to Use Language by M. G. W. Bamberg. Language, 67, 111-14.
23.
— ( 1995). Discourse organization and the development of reference to person, space, and time. In P. Fletcher & B. MacWhinney, Handbook of Child Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).
24.
Hickmann, M. & Schneider, P. (1993). Children's ability to restore the referential cohesion of stories. First Language, 13, 169-202.
25.
Hudson, J. & Nelson, K. (1983). Effects of script structure on children's story recall. Developmental Psychology, 19, 625-35.
26.
Kail, M. & Hickmann, M. (1992). French children's ability to introduce referents in narratives as a function of mutual knowledge. First Language , 12, 73-94.
27.
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1979). A Functional Approach to Child Language A Study of Determiners and Reference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
28.
— (1981). The grammatical marking of thematic structure in the development of language production. In W. Deutsch (ed.) The Child's Construction of Language (New York: Academic Press), 121-47.
29.
— (1987). Function and process in comparing language and cognition. In M. Hickmann (ed.), Social and Functional Approaches to Language and Thought ( Orlando, FL: Academic Press).
30.
Labov, W. & Waletsky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis: oral versions of personal experience. In J. Helm (ed.), Essays on the Verbal and the Visual Arts (Seattle, London: University of Washington Press).
31.
MacWhinney, B. & Bates E. (1978). Sentential devices for conveying givenness and newness: a cross-cultural developmental study. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 17, 539-58.
32.
Mandler, J.M. (1978). A code in the node: the use of story schema in retrieval. Drscourse Processes, 1, 14-35.
33.
Mandler, J.M. & De Forest, M. (1979). Is there more than one way to recall a story? Child Development, 50, 886-9.
34.
Mandler, J.M. & Johnson, N.S. (1977). Remembrance of things passed: story structure and recall. Cognitive Psychology, 9, 111-51.
35.
Maratsos, M.P. (1976). The use of Definite and Indefinite Reference in Young Children (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
36.
Mayer, M. (1967). A Boy, a Dog, and a Frog ( New York: The Dial Press). French version: Une grenouille apprivoisée (Éditions Gallimard, 1980).
37.
— (1969). Frog, where are you? (New York : The Dial Press). French version: Une grenouille se marie (Editions Gallimard, 1980 ).
38.
McCartney, K.A. & Nelson, K. (1981). Children's use of scripts in story recall. Discourse Processes, 4, 59-70.
39.
McGann, W. & Schwartz, A. (1988). Main character in children's narratives. Linguistics, 21, 215-33.
40.
Nelson, K. (ed.) (1986). Event Knowledge Structure and Function in Development (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum).
41.
Orsolini, M. (1990). Episodic structure in childen's fantasy narratives: 'breakthrough' to decontextualized discourse. Language and Cognitive Processes, 5, 53-79.
42.
Power, R.J.D. & Dal Martello, M.F. (1986). The use of the definite and indefinite articles by Italian preschool children. Journal of Child Language, 13, 145-54.
43.
Sauvaire, V. & Vion, M. (1989). Expression of the given/new contract in referential communication: a study of seven- and nine-year-old children. European Bulletin of Cognitive Psychology, 9, 431-49.
Shapiro, L.R. & Hudson, J.A. (1991). Tell me a make-believe story: coherence and cohesion in young children's picture elicited narratives. Developmental Psychology, 27, 960-74.
46.
Stein, N. & Glenn, C.G. (1979). An analysis of story comprehension in elementary school children. In R. Freedle (ed.), New Directions in Discourse Processing ( Norwood, NJ: Ablex).
47.
— ( 1982). Children's concepts of time: the development of a story schema. In W. Friedman (ed.), The Developmental Psychology of Time (New York: Academic Press), 255-81.
48.
Stein, N. & Nezworski, M.T. (1978). The effects of organization and instructional set on story memory. Discourse Processes , 1, 177-93.
49.
Stein, N. & Trabasso, T. (1981). What's in a story: critical issues in story comprehension . In R. Glaser (ed.), Advances in the Psychology in Instruction (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum), 213-67.
50.
Trabasso, T. & Nickels, M. (1992). The development of goal plans of action in the narration of picture stories. Discourse Processes, 15, 249-75.
51.
Trabasso, T. & Rodkin, P.C. (1994). Knowledge of goal/plans: a conceptual basis for narrating 'Frog, where are you?' In R. Berman & D. Slobin (eds), Different Ways of Relating Events in Narrative A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum).
52.
Vion, M. & Colas, A. (1987). La présentation du caractère ancien ou nouveau d'une information en Français. Archives de Psychologie, 55, 243-64.
53.
Warden, D. (1976). The influence of context on children's uses of identifying expressions and reference. British Journal of Psychology, 67, 101-12.
54.
— (1981). Learning to identify referents. British Journal of Psychology, 72, 93-9.
55.
Wigglesworth, G. (1990). Children's narrative acquisition: a study of some aspects of reference and anaphora. First Language, 10, 105-25.
