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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2020

Jeffrey E. KALLAY  and
Melissa A. REDFORD
Jeffrey E. KALLAY*
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
Melissa A. REDFORD
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
*
*Corresponding author: Linguistics Department, 1290 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR97403 E-mail: jkallay@uoregon.edu
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

Eugene Children's Story Corpusconceptual developmentlanguage developmentcoordinative conjunctions
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 88 - 109
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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