The Development of Narrative Discourse in French by 5 to 10 Years Old Children: Some Insights from a Conversational Interaction Method

Abstract

Children as young as 4-5 years can produce descriptive narratives but have been found to have difficulties to talk about causal and mind-oriented aspects of the story, such as the characters’ intentions and beliefs, or their different viewpoints. This paper considers whether the first narrative produced by the children represents the developmental limit of their competencies or whether children can be brought to produce more complex mind-oriented narratives through a simple procedure by which children are requested to focus on the causes of the story events, This question was investigated by presenting a sequence of five wordless pictures (the “stone story”) to 120 French-speaking children aged 5 to 10 years who narrated to the experimenter their first narrative. Then, 60 children participated in the causal-oriented conversation and 60 children served as control group and played a memory game with the story images. Results show that after the causal-oriented conversation, from 6 years on, children produced more coherent and mind-oriented narratives than they did in their first narrative. These improvements were not found in the control group. Pragmatic and cognitive aspects are discussed as possible causes of these improvements. We highlight the importance for assessment and remediation of the conversational procedure and of the resulting intra-individual variation.