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Effects of age and stimulus material on character introductions of Swedish-speaking four- to six-year-olds*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2017

JOSEFIN LINDGREN Open the ORCID record for JOSEFIN LINDGREN [Opens in a new window]
JOSEFIN LINDGREN*
Affiliation:
Uppsala University, Sweden
*
Address for correspondence: Josefin Lindgren, Uppsala University, Department of Linguistics and Philology, Box 635, 751 26 Uppsala, Sweden. e-mail: josefin.lindgren@lingfil.uu.se
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Abstract

This study investigates effects of age on character introductions in the oral narratives of seventy-two monolingual Swedish-speaking four- to six-year-olds, comparing results from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN; Gagarina et al., 2012, 2015), and the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI; Schneider et al., 2005). The proportion of appropriate referring expressions for introducing story characters clearly increases from age four to six. However, the children's performance is strongly stimulus-dependent. All age groups perform better on MAIN than on ENNI. One should thus be careful when drawing conclusions about the age at which children are able to use referring expressions appropriately.

Information

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , March 2018 , pp. 526 - 540
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

[*]

The author is grateful to Ute Bohnacker and Jorrig Vogels, the members of the Uppsala University empirical linguistics reading group, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper; to the children who participated in the study and their parents; and to the preschool teachers who helped recruiting the children.

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