Cohesion and anaphora in children's narratives: a comparison of English, French, German, and Mandarin Chinese

The aim of this study is to determine universal vs. language-specific aspects of children's ability to organize cohesive anaphoric relations in discourse. Analyses examine narratives produced on the basis of two picture sequences by subjects of four ages (preschoolers, seven-year-olds, ten-year...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of child language 1999-06, Vol.26 (2), p.419-452
Main Authors: HICKMANN, MAYA, HENDRIKS, HENRIËTTE
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adults
Anaphora
Biological and medical sciences
Child
Child development
Child Language
Child, Preschool
Children
Cohesion
Comparative Analysis
Crosslinguistic studies
Developmental psychology
English
Factors
Female
French
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
German
Humans
Language
Language Acquisition
Language Research
Language Universals
Linguistics
Male
Mandarin Chinese
Narration
Narratives
Pictorial Stimuli
Pragmatics
Preschool Children
Production and perception of spoken language
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Semantics
Speech
Syntax
Verbal Behavior
Young Children
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Summary:The aim of this study is to determine universal vs. language-specific aspects of children's ability to organize cohesive anaphoric relations in discourse. Analyses examine narratives produced on the basis of two picture sequences by subjects of four ages (preschoolers, seven-year-olds, ten-year-olds, adults) in four languages: English (n = 80), German (n = 40), French (n = 40), and Mandarin Chinese (n = 40). Particular attention is placed on the impact of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors in determining the uses of referring expressions and of word order in the maintenance of reference to the animate characters. Although subjecthood and agency determine NP position within the clause, role relations in discourse coreference account for NP form in all languages, notwithstanding some variations across languages, ages, and referents (e.g. density of coreference, null elements vs. overt pronouns, clause structures). It is concluded that the development of anaphora is determined by universal pragmatic principles and by language-specific properties characterizing how languages map discourse-internal and sentence-internal functions onto the same forms.
ISSN:0305-0009
1469-7602
DOI:10.1017/S0305000999003785