Description
This is a comparative study of how storytellers of different ages and different language groups approach the challenge of conveying a narrative. This study focuses on those elements devices that bring cohesion and coherence to a story. The devices emphasized in this study are connective markers, pronoun and noun phrases, and evaluative comments. While other crosslinguistic studies have investigated cohesion and coherence in narratives (Berman & Slobin 1994, Hickmann 2003), little comparative work has been done between Romanian and English children and adult narrations (across language group and among ages). The wordless picture book 'Frog Where are You?' by Mayer (1969) was used to generate the narrative data for this study. The age groups of the narrators in this study included 3-year-olds, 5-year-olds and adults (20-24 years old) in both languages. It was found that the usage of sequential connective markers increased with age while listing marker usage decreased in both languages. The data suggested that children gradually develop their understanding of temporal sequence during school years. Adult employed more specific forms of temporal sequencing than children. With regard to noun phases and pronouns it was found that pronoun usage decreased and noun phrase usage increased from childhood to adulthood in both languages. It was also found that ambiguous pronoun use decreased as age increased in both languages. This data suggests that pronoun use may be less taxing cognitively than using noun phrases. This study showed that the frequency of the use of evaluative comments increased with age. It appears that as children grow older their style of narration becomes more sophisticated and complex, changing from telling the story picture-by-picture to a more fluid description with links to more than one picture. The frequency of usage of distancing devices also increased as a function of age. As the story became more complex the older children and adults developed the cognitive ability to distance themselves from the story. It was found that the frequency of usage of negative qualifiers and causal connectors decreased in both languages as children grew older and reached their lowest frequency in adults. Another finding was that older children and adults were more adept than younger children at identifying positive emotions that characters in the story were feeling. The overall increase of frequency of usage of these evaluative comments suggests that there are cognitive developmental changes from childhood to adulthood that result in a more complex understanding of the relationship between emotions and events.
