Maintaining and reintroducing referents in French: Cognitive constraints and development of narrative skills.

Monique Vion (1) , Annie Colas (1)

1 CREPCO - Centre de Recherche en Psychologie Cognitive

Seven- to eleven-year-old French-speaking children and adults told "silent" comic strip stories that differed by the frame display mode, by the explicitness of the links between depicted events, and whether the topic changed on the last frame. The results showed that (a) the character in the last frame was usually referred to as a given, with a definite pronoun when the topic was maintained and a definite noun phrase or a left dislocation when the topic changed; (b) joint display of frames triggered more pronouns and left dislocations, while single-frame display led to more definite noun phrases; and (c) explicit links gave rise to more pronouns. The production conditions manipulated turned out to be a good means of assessing speakers' acquisition of within-discourse referencing expressions and narrative skills: the children gradually refined and adjusted their use of definite expressions and pronouns, whereas the adults more readily used narration-specific devices.

Keywords: oral communication; reference cohesion; narratives; language development; school-age children; adulthood

Domains: Psychology and behavior

Monique Vion, Annie Colas. Maintaining and reintroducing referents in French: Cognitive constraints and development of narrative skills.. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 1999, 72, pp.32-50. ⟨hal-00134161⟩