ERIC Number: EJ1293803
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2021-Apr
Pages: 21
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0142-7237
EISSN: N/A
Individual Differences in Narrative Production in Late Childhood: Associations with Age and Fiction Reading Experience
Hamilton, Lorna G.; O'Halloran, Isabelle; Cutting, Nicola
First Language, v41 n2 p179-199 Apr 2021
Narrative production draws upon linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic skills, and is subject to substantial individual differences. This study aimed to characterise the development of narrative production in late childhood and to assess whether children's cumulative experience of reading fiction is associated with individual differences in narrative language skills. One-hundred-and-twenty-five 9- to 12-year-old children told a story from a wordless picture book, and their narratives were coded for syntactic, semantic and discourse-pragmatic features. The grammatical complexity and propositional content of children's narratives increased with age between 9 and 12 years, while narrative cohesion, coherence and use of mental state terms were stable across the age range. Measures of fiction reading experience were positively correlated with several indices of narrative production quality and predicted unique variance in narrative macrostructure after controlling for individual differences in vocabulary knowledge, word reading accuracy and theory of mind. These findings are discussed in terms of the continued importance of 'book language' as part of the language input beyond early childhood.
Descriptors: Individual Differences, Child Development, Narration, Reading Materials, Fiction, Correlation, Language Skills, Elementary School Students, Language Acquisition, Picture Books, Syntax, Pragmatics, Vocabulary Skills, Accuracy, Reading Skills, Theory of Mind, Linguistic Input, Native Language, Age Differences, Longitudinal Studies, Reading Tests, Recreational Reading, Foreign Countries
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Elementary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: United Kingdom
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A