Expressing coreference in French: Cognitive constraints and development of narrative skills.
Résumé
This study looks at how coreference is expressed under various oral production conditions and at various stages of development. Seven- to 11-year-old children and adults told "silent" comic strip stories involving two characters to a same-age peer. The stories varied as to (1) the frame presentation mode, (2) the the links between events across frames, and (3) thematic continuity. The results showed that (1) in general, all speakers marked increasing referent givenness (the 7-year-olds and adults less so than the 11-year-olds), (2) arbitrarily placed picture sequences led to a greater number of markers of increasing referent givenness than ordered sequences (which made it easier to put the information into story format), and (3) speakers were more inclined to "tell the story" when the frames were shown all at once (on the same page) than when they were presented in booklet format (one frame per page). The manipulation of the production conditions turned out to be an effective way of revealing speaker competence. In step-by-step encoding where the pictures were discovered one at a time, 7-year-old children exhibited a greater tendency to describe each frame as an independent entity, 11-year-old children always marked increasing referent givenness, and adults maintained coreference in a more flexible manner by varying the markers used to express referent givenness. The viewing of all frames at once before encoding provided support for the expression of emerging narrative skills. This condition enabled the 7-year-olds to no longer describe the pictures independently, promoted the marking of increasing referent givenness between the ages of 7 and 9, and pointed out the age (9 years) when the speakers began to mark coreference as a function of how the story ended.
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