Referent tracking strategies of young children in extended narrative discourse

Introducing, tracking and differentiating between the various characters in a story are essential features of storytelling. This paper reports on a study in which narratives were elicited from ten female and ten male subjects at each of four ages: six, eight, ten and adult, to explore the development of these skills. The stories were elicited by using a twenty-four page picture book in which two main characters, a dog and a boy, search for a third, a frog. Across both age and gender groups it was found that while references were switched and maintained in similar proportions over the whole story, the use of nouns or pronouns for these functions varied with adults tending to use more nouns where the subject of the clause was involved a switch of reference from the subject of the previous clause, and more pronouns where the subjects of consecutive clauses were the same. Examination of the narratives of the four and six year olds suggests that by the age of six a number of subjects were using a thematic subject strategy to organise their narratives, although its use was influenced by the complexity of specific episodes in the story. A thematic subject strategy was rarely evident in the narratives of the four year olds