Ms. Allen et al., CHILDRENS NARRATIVE PRODUCTIONS - A COMPARISON OF PERSONAL EVENT AND FICTIONAL STORIES, Applied psycholinguistics, 15(2), 1994, pp. 149-176
Personal event narratives and fictional stories are narrative genres w
hich emerge early and undergo further development throughout the presc
hool and early elementary school years. This study compares personal e
vent and fictional narratives across two language-ability groups using
episodic analysis. Thirty-six normal children (aged 4 to 8 years) wer
e divided into high and low language-ability groups using Developmenta
l Sentence Scoring (DSS). Three fictional stories and three personal e
vent narratives were gathered from each subject and were scored for le
ngth in communication units, total types of structures found within th
e narrative, and structure of the whole narrative. Narrative genre dif
ferences significantly influenced narrative structure for both languag
e-ability groups and narrative length for the high language-ability gr
oup, Personal events were told with more reactive sequences and comple
te episodes than fictional stories, while fictional stories were told
with more action sequences and multiple-episode structures. Compared t
o the episodic story structure of fictional stories, where a prototypi
cal ''good' story is a multiple-episode structure, a reactive sequence
and/or a single complete episode structure may be an alternate, invol
ving mature narrative forms for relating personal events. These findin
gs suggest that narrative structures for personal event narratives and
fictional stories may follow different developmental paths. Finally,
differences in productive language abilities contributed to the distin
ctions in narrative structure between fictional stories and personal e
vent narratives. As compared to children in the low group, children in
the high group told narratives with greater numbers of complete and m
ultiple episodes, and their fictional stories were longer than their p
ersonal event narratives.