Anaphoric reference in oral narratives of 6- and 7-year-old children
The present study investigates 6- to 7-year-old children's ability to use anaphoric pronominal reference in oral narratives. For frequency of anaphoric pronoun use, there appears to be a significant difference between child and adult performance. Although children and adults generally refer to the same categories of noun referents, children evidence a greater number of noun referents in their narratives. Age was found to be a significant factor for appropriate use of nominals and pronominals with respect to their function within narratives. Children tend to rely heavily on using pronominals to serve both in maintaining reference (correct usage) as well as switching reference (incorrect usage) to characters and objects in stories. Children are significantly better at appropriate usage of nominals and pronominals for the unstructured conversational narrative than for the structured narrative of story retelling. Within-group comparison of child subjects according to their scores on the Peabody Individual Achievement Test indicate that even small differences in reading ability were significantly related to increases in appropriate functional usage of nominals and pronominals in narratives.
Health Sciences, Speech Pathology, Psychology, Developmental
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign