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

Abstract

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.

Adapting MAIN to eliciting stories from adults and in a remote context: What do we have to consider, and what do we know?

“…Its pictorial representation was originally developed for children between the ages of 3 and 10 (cf. Gagarina, Klop et al, 2019, p. 1) but later was successfully used with teenagers and adults (Antonijević et al, 2022;Gagarina et al, 2019b;Jažić et al, 2023;Krasnoshchekova & Kashleva, 2019;Mattiuada et al, 2022;Vogels & Lindgren, 2022). However, it also requires a background view, which I want to provide here.…”

“…Thus, there is essential comparability. In addition, there are studies collecting data from adults and using them as a control group (e.g., Hržica & Kuvač Kraljević, 2022;Vogels & Lindgren, 2022) and two important studies focusing on adult's narratives elicited with the help of MAIN in a remote context (Antonijević et al, 2022;Jažić et al, 2023). Antonijević et al (2022) aimed to establish measures of macrostructure in narratives of Irish-English bilingual adults to create a baseline for comparison with narratives of respectively bilingual children.…”

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

“…Its pictorial representation was originally developed for children between the ages of 3 and 10 (cf. Gagarina, Klop et al, 2019, p. 1) but later was successfully used with teenagers and adults (Antonijević et al, 2022;Gagarina et al, 2019b;Jažić et al, 2023;Krasnoshchekova & Kashleva, 2019;Mattiuada et al, 2022;Vogels & Lindgren, 2022). However, it also requires a background view, which I want to provide here.…”

“…Thus, there is essential comparability. In addition, there are studies collecting data from adults and using them as a control group (e.g., Hržica & Kuvač Kraljević, 2022;Vogels & Lindgren, 2022) and two important studies focusing on adult's narratives elicited with the help of MAIN in a remote context (Antonijević et al, 2022;Jažić et al, 2023). Antonijević et al (2022) aimed to establish measures of macrostructure in narratives of Irish-English bilingual adults to create a baseline for comparison with narratives of respectively bilingual children.…”