This study considered the adequacy of references used by children to introduce, maintain, and reintroduce characters in complex narratives involving multiple characters. Sixty-three English-speaking Canadian children from kindergarten to second grade (M age 7.0 years) told two multi-episode stories from wordless picture books. Analyses considered differences in referential adequacy both within-children and between grades. There was an unexpectedly large difference in adequacy levels across stories, mostly because of an overuse of pronouns in one story. Maintenance was the easiest referential function, whereas reintroduction proved more difficult than introduction only for the story with consistently lower adequacy levels. Participants across grades were affected by referential function and by story in analogous ways. The kindergartners did nonetheless obtain lower adequacy levels than the two higher grades due to a higher use of pronouns and because they were less able to clearly refer to characters even when they were using the same linguistic forms. Participants in the three grades successfully used a diversity of linguistic forms for their character references across referential functions. Together, these findings have important implications for referential cohesion in young school-aged children. First, they invite caution when drawing conclusions regarding developmental changes based on a single story. Second, they suggest that reintroduction may be particularly sensitive to story features that make referencing more demanding. Finally, they underscore the importance of considering reference within the broader textual context in order to produce a detailed account of referential abilities.

This study considered the linguistic forms used by 63 English-speaking Canadian children from kindergarten to second grade (ages 5;6-8;8) to introduce, maintain reference to, and reintroduce primary and secondary characters throughout their narratives The expected referring forms were used more frequently for the best-matching referential function: indefinites for introduction, pronouns and null forms for maintenance, and identifiables (i.e., definite and possessive NPs, and proper names) for reintroduction. Developmental changes in form-function mappings were present for both introduction and reintroduction. Many children were also influenced by the relative prominence of story characters in their use of pronominals. Nonetheless, function constraints exerted a much stronger influence on referential choice than did character primacy in all grades. By systematically exploring the interplay of referential function and character primacy on referring expressions, this study adds to existing findings on many levels. It also invites future research that manipulates various features of both primary and secondary characters.Creating and sustaining clear reference to story characters require the narrator to monitor the listener's familiarity with the various characters so as to present the information in a way that is easily interpretable. Character reference can occur at different points in

This individual differences study is the first to show a link between updating and performance in a discourse production task for young school-age children. The findings contribute to the growing body of research investigating the role of working memory in shaping language production. This study invites extension to children of different ages and language abilities as well as to other language production tasks.