Occasions for Providing Resolutions (or not) in Turkish Preschool Conversational Narratives

Many developmental studies of narrative isolate resolutions as a structural element, aiming to demonstrate age-related influences on the presence or absence of this component in children’s narrative productions. This study is an ethnographic study of Turkish children’s conversationally occasioned narratives investigating the conversational occasions that lead to provision or omission of a problem-resolution structure in children’s narratives. The data come from 60 hours of naturalistically collected talk of preschool children aged 3-to-6 in two different preschools. The results indicate that Turkish preschool children often provide narratives without a problem-resolution structure but also that they can provide high-point structures, depending on the speech situation. The analyses reveal that whether children organize their narratives in terms of a problem-resolution structure is dependent on the characteristics of the recounted events and conversational factors rather than merely age-related competence.