CHILDRENS NARRATIVE PRODUCTIONS - A COMPARISON OF PERSONAL EVENT AND FICTIONAL STORIES

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.