Expressing coreference in French: Cognitive constraints and development ofnarrative skills

This study looks at how coreference is expressed under various oral product ion conditions and at various stages of development. Seven- to 11-year-old children and adults told "silent" comic sti-ip stories involving two charac ters to a same-age peer. The stories varied as to: (1) the frame presentati on mode, (2) the links between events across frames, and (3) thematic conti nuity. The results showed that, (1) in general, all speakers marked increas ing referent givenness (the 7-year-olds and adults less so than the 11-year -olds), (2) arbitrarily placed picture sequences led to a greater number of markers of increasing referent givenness than ordered sequences (which mad e it easier to put the information into story format), and (3) speakers wer e more inclined to "tell the story" when the frames were shown all at once (on the same page) than when they were presented in booklet format (one fra me per page). The manipulation of the production conditions turned out to b e an effective way of revealing speaker competence. in step-by-step encodin g where the pictures were discovered one at a time, 7-year-old children exh ibited a greater tendency to describe each frame as an independent entity, Ii-year-old children always marked increasing referent givenness, and adult s maintained coreference in a more flexible manner by varying the markers u sed to express referent givenness. The viewing of all frames at once before encoding provided support for the expression of emerging narrative skills. This condition enabled the 7-year-olds to no longer describe the pictures independently, promoted the marking of increasing referent givenness betwee n the ages of 7 and 9, and pointed out the age (9 years) when the speakers began to mark coreference as a function of how the story ended.