Referential cohesion in Swedish preschool children's narratives

Lindgren, Josefin; Vogels, Jorrig

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2018.06.007

Cited by 11 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…more highly accessible) for the children, and that this influences the use of pronouns. Results from a study of referent reintroduction and maintenance by Swedish monolinguals that employed the same stimulus materials as in the present study (Lindgren & Vogels, 2018) support this conclusion.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

“…Based on the existing literature, we predict differences in the use of referring expressions for introducing characters between the age groups, similarly to what has been found for e.g. monolingual Swedish-speaking children (Lindgren, 2018b), but not between the languages, as the referential systems are comparable (Finnstedt, 2013;Serratrice, 2007), and that animacy (humanness) will influence the proportion of pronouns used to introduce characters (Kail & Hickmann, 1992;Lindgren & Vogels, 2018). We also expect the children's language exposure and proficiency to influence their performance (Andreou et al, 2015;Jia & Paradis, 2015), and potentially more so for the minority language German, to which the children are exposed somewhat less (see below).…”

supporting

confidence: 70%

“…Kail and Hickmann (1992) found that the children used more pronouns to introduce the boy than the other, nonhuman, characters in Frog Story narratives. In a recent study of anaphoric reference in Swedish monolingual children aged 4–6 using the same stimulus material as in the present study, Lindgren and Vogels (2018) found that animacy significantly influenced the children’s use of pronouns: more pronouns were used for human referents than for nonhuman animates and inanimate referents. The type of story character, including whether it is human or not, thus seems to influence which types of referring expressions children use to refer to them.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 61%

“…Animacy, and more specifically humanness, is also a factor that influences children’s use of referring expressions (e.g. Kail & Hickmann, 1992; Lindgren & Vogels, 2018; see also the overview in Hickmann et al, 2015). Kail and Hickmann (1992) found that the children used more pronouns to introduce the boy than the other, nonhuman, characters in Frog Story narratives.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Character introductions in oral narratives of Swedish–German bilingual preschoolers

2020

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Closely related Swedish and German both mark information status of referents morphologically, though little is known about its acquisition. This study investigates character introductions in the narratives of 4- and 6-year-old Swedish–German bilinguals ( N = 40) in both languages, elicited with MAIN Cat/Dog. We analyse effects of age group, language and animacy (human vs nonhuman characters) on the type of referring expression (indefinite NP and pronoun), as well as effects of language proficiency and exposure on the use of indefinite NPs for each language. We also explore which syntactic constructions indefinite NPs occur in. A significant difference was found between the two age groups, but not between languages. No effect was found of language skills or exposure. Four-year-olds used more pronouns and a lower proportion of indefinite NPs than 6-year-olds. Pronouns were more frequent for the human character than for nonhuman animate characters. Whilst animacy (humanness) promoted the use of pronouns, it did not affect the choice of morphological form for lexical NPs (indefinite/definite). The age groups differed in how indefinite NPs were used. Four-year-olds produced fewer narrative presentations (where a character is introduced as part of a typical story opening, e.g. Once upon a time there was a cat) than 6-year-olds, and more labellings (with only an NP, or a clausal predicative, e.g. That’s a cat). Qualitative analyses suggest that the children’s indefinite NPs in labelling constructions can be both referential (when setting the narrative scene), and type-denoting (when naming referents in individual pictures). Whilst the children’s abilities to introduce story characters develop measurably from 4 to 6 years in Swedish and German, appropriateness of character introductions not only depends on whether an indefinite NP is chosen, but also on the syntactic construction this indefinite NP is used in.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

supporting

confidence: 70%

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 61%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Character introductions in oral narratives of Swedish–German bilingual preschoolers

2020

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“…Accessibility can also be influenced by properties of the referent that remain constant throughout the discourse, such as (in)animacy and humanness (e.g. Karmiloff-Smith, 1981; Küntay, 2002; Lindgren & Vogels, 2018; Serratrice, 2013), as well as protagonisthood, that is, whether the referent is a main character or a secondary one (e.g. Aksu-Koç & Nicolopoulou, 2015; Kail & Sanchez y Lopez, 1997).…”

Section: Referentiality and Decontextualised Discoursementioning

confidence: 99%

A new perspective on referentiality in elicited narratives: Introduction to the Special Issue

Gagarina

Bohnacker

2021

First Language

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This special issue investigates the use of referential expressions in elicited picture-based narratives by children with and without developmental language disorders, across a range of languages and language combinations. All contributions use the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN, Gagarina et al. 2012, 2019). The studies featured in this issue cover monolingual and bilingual children aged 4–11 years, but focus mainly on age 4–7, a period in a child’s life where great strides are made in the development of narrative skills. This collection of papers offers a new perspective on referentiality for several reasons: all studies use the same stimuli and by and large the same procedure for the elicitation of narratives. The stimuli, four picture-based stories, are controlled for comparability of protagonists, plot and story structure. They were designed as a ‘visual’ representation of a multidimensional model of story grammar. This methodological and theoretical base allows for a comparative investigation of referentiality (including reference introduction, maintenance and reintroduction) in narratives, across languages and populations. This introduction addresses theoretical aspects of referentiality in decontextualised discourse and reviews the literature regarding the impact of language-specific referential systems and the age and path of acquisition in typically developing children and children with developmental language disorders. We also discuss methodological aspects of eliciting referentiality in narratives in detail. This introduction thus seeks explanations for the diverse and sometimes contradictory empirical results regarding children’s mastery of referentiality. Finally, an overview of the contributions in the special issue is given.

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The Development of Referring Expression Use from Age 4 to 7 in Swedish-Speaking Children

Vogels

Lindgren

2022

Discourse Processes

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When telling a story, a speaker needs to refer to story characters using appropriate expressions, which requires a mental model of the discourse. We hypothesize that, compared to those of adults, children's discourse models are based more on factors that are less cognitively demanding, such as animacy, and as they grow older, discourse factors such as givenness will start to play a larger role. To test this, we conducted a longitudinal study of referring expression use in elicited narratives. Swedish-speaking children (n = 17) were tested three times between age 4 and 7 and compared to adults (n = 20). The results show that children, like adults, take into account if, when and how a character has been mentioned earlier when referring, but that they rely more on animacy than adults. These results indicate that the various cues for referential choices are in place in preschool children's discourse models, but are weighted differently than in adults.

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Referential cohesion in Swedish preschool children's narratives

Cited by 11 publications

References 31 publications

Character introductions in oral narratives of Swedish–German bilingual preschoolers

Character introductions in oral narratives of Swedish–German bilingual preschoolers

A new perspective on referentiality in elicited narratives: Introduction to the Special Issue

The Development of Referring Expression Use from Age 4 to 7 in Swedish-Speaking Children

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