Development of Parental Narrative Input

Abstract The purpose of this study was to investigate the narratives of parents addressed to their children of different ages. The study had two major aims: first, to describe the formal and functional aspects and relationships in these Hebrew-speaking parents' narratives; and second, to describe the social-interactional exchanges that take place in the parental storytelling activity and trace a developmental pattern in such interactions. Using the Frog, Where Are You? picture book (Mayer, 1969), 75 monolingual Hebrew-speaking parents were asked to tell the story to their children (child's age groups: 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7+ years old) in their homes. Sessions were recorded by the parents. The stories were transcribed and coded by two independent raters. The findings show that the parental narrative input to which children are exposed at various ages is different. There is a developmental trend in this input in terms of structure and interaction. As far as structure is concerned, parental narrative input shows similar developmental traits to those observed in the narratives produced by children of the same age groups. As far as the interactional aspect of the parental narrative input, a three-stage developmental model of the socio-interactional nature of the input is proposed.