The expression of simultaneity in Thai children's narratives

![CDATA[The aim of the study outlined is to investigate how Thai children in comparison with adults express simultaneity or the overlap of two actions depicted in frog story narratives. The frog story, Frog, where are you? by Mercer Mayer (1967), is a wordless picture book consisting of 24 black and white pictures. It has been used extensively across different languages to investigate how speakers from different languages tell the same story (see Berman & Slobin, 1994; Strömqvist & Verhoeven, 2004). The story is about a child and his/her dog searching for their pet frog that has escaped. For example, in the picture from the frog story in Appendix 1, it can be seen that the child and his/her dog are sleeping, and while they are sleeping the pet frog escapes from the jar. In this picture there are two simultaneous, overlapping or co-occurring actions “the child and dog are sleeping” and “the frog is escaping”. In the current study, we are interested in how Thai children and adults express these types of overlapping or simultaneous events or actions and the relationship between these events or actions, when telling the frog story. Of particular interest is how children gradually acquire the story telling skills and abilities of adults. In order to achieve a greater understanding of this process, we will examine the main linguistic devices used to explicitly express simultaneity in Thai children, aged 4 years, 6 years, 9 years in comparison with adults in Thai frog story narratives.]]