The effects of narrative types in children's narrative production

This study investigates the relationship between narrative type and participant age, focusing on the following aspects: length of elicited narratives, text cohesion and the complexity of sentences used in narratives. The participants in this study consisted of 30 monolingual Japanese speakers in three different age groups; 4-5 (n=10), 8-9 (n=10), and adults (n=10). The participants were asked to tell a story by using two types of narrative elicitation tasks; two sets of four picture sequences and one 24 wordless picture book (Frog, where are you?). The data suggest that a relationship exists between text length, cohesion, and the development of cohesive devices with age. However, no absolute relationships between text length and the use of more complex sentences were found. A comparison of the two types of narrative elicitation tasks also gave mixed results, with differences only found amongst the youngest group who performed better with the shorter narrative.