Dissertation Research: The Development of the Expression ofTime and Event in Narrative

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ABSTRACT By the time children are five years old, they are using many of the same linguistic and gestural devices that adults do to mark the relationship between events in a story. This fact has lead many researchers on narrative skills to presuppose the notion of event. The present study asks whether appearances may not be deceiving; whether children and adult's similar linguistic means function in fundamentally different ways. In the first phase of the study adults and children aged 4-5, 7-8, and 10-11 will watch a short cartoon and then narrate the story to a same-age listener. Analyses of verbal and gestural transcripts will focus on the linguistic devices for conveying temporal structure in narrative, and on the use of non- representational gestures which adults produce when they are introducing and commenting on narrative events. In the second phase, the same subjects will be presented with stills from the stimulus cartoon and asked to "group the pictures that belong together". Event groupings will be compared with a frame- by-frame analysis of the stimulus cartoon, and with each subject's choice of temporal conjunctions and placement of beats and deictic gestures. In this way, this study begins to find out how children convey the interrelationship of events in narrative with the linguistic and gestural means at their disposal, and contributes to an understanding of the interaction between cognitive ability and linguistic skills in the development of narrative competence.