The development of narrative skills in monolingual Swedish-speaking children aged 4 to 9: a longitudinal study

Abstract

This longitudinal study investigated the development of oral narrative skills in monolingual Swedish-speaking children (N = 17). The MAIN Cat/Dog stories were administered at four timepoints between age 4 and 9. Different narrative aspects were found to develop differently. In story comprehension, the children performed high already at T1 (4;4) and were at ceiling at T2 (5;10), whereas story structure developed significantly until T4 (9;4). Narrative length and syntactic complexity reached a plateau at T3 (7;4). Referent introduction was not mastered until T4. The results suggest that general conclusions regarding the development of narrative skills depend on the specific aspects studied.

Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives: Recent developments and new language adaptations

“…7 A number of studies have compared performance on story comprehension between the two stories within a pair, where different children told different stories (i.e., a between-subjects design). Here, no significant differences have been found between Cat and Dog Bohnacker & Lindgren, 2021;Lindgren, 2018, whereas scores have been found to be significantly higher on Baby Goats than on Baby Birds, for monolinguals (Bohnacker & Lindgren, 2021; and for bilinguals, at least in one of the languages , for Turkish of Turkish-Swedishbilinguals; Bohnacker & Lindgren, 2021, for English of English-Swedish bilinguals). For story comprehension there are thus indications that, on the one hand, the pairs Cat/Dog and Baby Birds/Baby Goats may not be completely comparable, but also that Baby Goats and Baby Birds may differ.…”

“…The majority of the studies using MAIN have focused on age 4 to 7, i.e., children attending preschool and/or the first grades of primary school, depending on the school system of the country (e.g., Altman et al, 2016;Boerma et al, 2016;Bohnacker & Lindgren, 2021;Fichman et al, 2022;Haddad, 2022;Kapalková et al, 2016;Lindgren, 2018;Peristeri et al, 2020;Roch et al, 2016;Wehmeier, 2020), with fewer studies including children aged 8 or above (e.g., Fiani et al, 2020; Gagarina, that children's story structure reaches a plateau before it develops further. Again, some studies found differences between groups or languages.…”

“…Some studies compared them to monolinguals (e.g., Blom & Boerma, 2020;Boerma et al, 2016;Bohnacker & Lindgren, 2021;Kunnari & Välimaa, 2020;Peristeri et al, 2020;Rodina, 2017;, others compared different bilingual groups (e.g., Blom & Boerma, 2020), or bilinguals' two languages (e.g., Altman et al, 2016;Bohnacker et al, , 2022Bohnacker & Lindgren, 2021;Fiani et al, 2020Fichman et al, 2022;Kapalková et al, 2016;Kunnari & Välimaa, 2020;Lindgren & Bohnacker, 2020Rodina, 2017;Tribushinina et al, 2022). One study combined all three types of comparisons (Lindgren, 2018). Several studies using MAIN have also investigated the effect of background factors or general language skills on bilinguals' narrative skills.…”

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

“…Future studies should preferably investigate development longitudinally in children at older ages as well, i.e., look at development in the same children also after age 7. Results from a recent study where the children of the present study were followed until age 9 and which included a broad measure of the ability to introduce referents appropriately (Lindgren, 2022) as well as other narrative aspects, indicate that these abilities develop further between age 7 and 9. Additionally, qualitative in-depth analyses of individual children's narratives at different ages are needed in order to fully understand variation in developmental trajectories.…”

“…15 of the 17 children in the present study were part of the 4-year-olds group in Lindgren (2018aLindgren ( , 2018b and Lindgren and Vogels (2018). The data from the children in the present study, with the addition of a fourth testing point at age 9, has also been analyzed in a recent study investigating different narrative skills (Lindgren, 2022). This study included a broad measure of the children's ability to introduce referents (a score from 0-12 points based on the appropriateness of the referring expressions used to introduce the story characters and one important inanimate object), which is different from the more fine-grained analyses of the present study, and is therefore not described further here.…”