Maintaining and reintroducing referents in French: Cognitive constraints and development of narrative skills

Seven- to eleven-year-old French-speaking children and adults told "silent" comic strip stories that differed by the frame display mode, by the explic itness of the links between depicted events, and whether the topic changed on the last frame. The results showed that (a) the character in the last fr ame was usually referred to as a given, with a definite pronoun when the to pic was maintained and a definite noun phrase or a left dislocation when th e topic changed; (b) joint display of frames triggered more pronouns and le ft dislocations, while single-frame display led to more definite noun phras es; and (c) explicit links gave rise to more pronouns. The production condi tions manipulated turned out to be a good means of assessing speakers' acqu isition of within-discourse referencing expressions and narrative skills: t he children gradually refined and adjusted their use of definite expression s and pronouns, whereas the adults more readily used narration-specific dev ices. (C) 1999 Academic Press.