Clause-initial AND usage in a cross-sectional and longitudinal corpus of school-age children's narratives

• Published in: Journal of child language Vol. 48; no. 1; pp. 88 - 109
• Main Authors: Kallay, Jeffrey E, Redford, Melissa A
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Cambridge University Press 01.01.2021
• Subjects: Age Factors; Child; Child Language; Child, Preschool; Children; Children & youth; Childrens picture books; Clauses; Coding; Comprehension; Corpus linguistics; Cross-Sectional Studies; English language; Expressive Language; Female; Humans; Hypotheses; Individual Differences; Inferences; Language Acquisition; Language Development; Language Tests; Linguistic complexity; Linguistics; Male; Mean length of utterance; Narration; Narrative structure; Narratives; Oregon; Short Term Memory; Speech; Storytelling; Students - statistics & numerical data; Syntax; Variables; Vocabulary; Young Children; Oregon; coordinative conjunctions; Eugene Children's Story Corpus; language development; conceptual development
• ISSN: 0305-0009; 1469-7602
• DOI: 10.1017/S0305000920000197

Young children adopt an event-chaining strategy when storytelling, frequently linking clauses with and. The current study tested whether age-related changes in clause-initial and usage might index narrative structure development in the Eugene Children's Story Corpus (ECSC), which includes 180 structured spontaneous narratives elicited yearly for three years from 60 children, aged five to seven at study onset. The narratives were segmented into clauses to quantify clause-initial and usage. Adult judgments of narrative coherence and cohesiveness were elicited as measures of narrative structure. Mean length of utterance (MLU) and clause (MLC) were used as measures of language complexity. Results indicated developmental increases in all measures, but only and-connected dependent clause usage increased with cross-sectional and longitudinal age. Only MLC predicted the relative frequency of clause-initial and regardless of children's age. These results suggest children's frequent use of and to connect events reflects immature language; its association with flat narrative structure is likely epiphenomenal.