In:Social Environment and Cognition in Language Development: Studies in honor of Ayhan Aksu-Koç
Edited by F. Nihan Ketrez, Aylin C. Küntay, Şeyda Özçalışkan and Aslı Özyürek
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 21] 2017
► pp. 199–222
Chapter 13Developing construals of a narrative event sequence
Published online: 18 July 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.21.13ber
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.21.13ber
The chapter examines Hebrew-language excerpts relating to a particular episode in the “frog-story” picture book following on from Aksu-Koç and Tekdemir’s (2004) study of “the interplay between narrativity and mindreading.” Verbalizations of Hebrew-speaking preschoolers and school children compared with adults provide further evidence for the complex interweaving of cognitive and linguistic knowledge in development of narrative abilities. Young preschool children show native-like command of clause-level grammar and lexicon, but fail to recognize the protagonist’s misconception whereas by school-age, participants invariably correctly identify the objects depicted graphically by the author-illustrator. Findings are discussed in terms of the developing ability to recognize this complex interrelation between events and to verbalize them in linguistically appropriate terms.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Results
- 2.1Preschoolers aged 3 to 6 years
- 2.2Schoolchildren aged 7 to 12 Years
- 2.3Mature adult renderings
- 3.Discussion
Acknowledgment Notes References Appendix
References (42)
Aksu-Koç, A. & Tekdemir, G.. 2004. Interplay between narrativity and mind reading: A comparison between Turkish and English. In Relating Events in Narrative: Typological and Contextual Perspectives, S. Strömqvist & L. Verhoeven (eds), 307–328. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Bamberg, M.. 1985. Form and Function in the Construction of Narrratives: Developmental Perspectives. PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
. 1990. Acquiring an (S)VO language: Subjectless sentences in children's Hebrew. Linguistics 28: 1135–1166.
. 1993. Developmental perspectives on transitivity: A confluence of cues. In Other Children, Other Languages: Issues in the Theory of Acquisition, Y. Levy (ed.), 189–241. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
. 1994. Formal, lexical, and semantic factors in acquisition of Hebrew resultative participles. In Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistic Society, S. Gahl, A. Dolbey, & C. Johnson (eds), 82–92. Berkeley CA: BLS.
. 1995. Narrative competence and storytelling performance: How children tell stories in different contexts. Journal of Narrative and Life History 5: 285–331.
. 2004a. Between emergence and mastery: The long developmental route of language acquisition. In Language Development across Childhood and Adolescence [Trends in Language Acquisition Research 3], 9–34. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. 2004b. The role of context in developing narrative abilities. In Relating Events inNnarrative: Typological and Contextual Perspectives, S. Strömqvist & L. Verhoeven (eds), 261–280. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
. 2007. Developing language knowledge and language use across adolescence. In Handbook of Language Development, E. Hoff & M. Shatz, (eds), 346–367. London: Blackwell.
. 2008. The psycholinguistics of developing text construction. Journal of Child Language 35: 735–771.
. 2011. Revisiting impersonal constructions in Hebrew: Corpus-based perspectives. In The Typology of Impersonal Constructions [Studies in Language Companion Series 124], A. Malchukov & A. Sierwieska (eds), 323–355. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. 2015. Language development beyond the sentence. In Cambridge Handbook of Language Development, E. Bavin & L. Naigles (eds). Cambridge: CUP.
. 2016. Typology, acquisition, and development: The view from Israeli Hebrew. In Acquisition and Development of Hebrew: From Infancy to Adolescence [Trends in Language Acquisition Research 19], R. Berman (ed.), 1–38. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Berman, R. A. & Katzenberger, I.. 1998. Cognitive and linguistic factors in development of picture-series narration. Studia Iltaliani i Linguistica Teorica e Applicata 27: 21–47.
Berman, R. A. & Neeman, Y.. 1994. Development of linguistic forms: Hebrew. In Relating Events in Narrative: A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study, R. A. Berman & D. I. Slobin (eds), 285–328. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Berman, R. A. & Nir-Sagiv, B.. 2007. Comparing narrative and expository text construction across adolescence: A developmental paradox. Discourse Processes 43(2): 79–120.
. 2009. Cognitive and linguistic factors in evaluating expository text quality: Global versus local? In New Directions in Cognitive Linguistics [Human Cognitive Processing 24], V. Evans & S. Pourcel (eds), 421–440. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Berman, R. A. & Slobin, D. I.. (eds). 1994. Relating Events in Narrative: A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Berman, R. A. & Verhoeven, L.. 2002. Developing text production abilities across languages and age-groups. Written Language and Literacy 5(1): 1–44.
Bornens, M.-T. 1990. Problems brought about by reading a "sequence" of pictures. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 49: 189–226.
Clark, H. H.. 2004. Variations on a ranarian theme. In Relating Events in Narrative: Typological and Contextual Perspectives, S. Strömqvist & L. Verhoeven (eds), 457–476. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
. 2004. Coherence, cohesion, and context in narrative development: Some comparative perspectives in narrative development. In Relating Events in Narrative: Typological and Contextual Perspectives, S. Strömqvist & L. Verhoeven (eds), 281–307. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Hickmann, M., Schimke, S. & Colonna, S.. 2015. Learning to refer to entities in narrative discourse: A cross-linguistic perspective. In The Acquisition of Reference [Trends in Language Acquisition Research 15], L. Serratice & S. Allen (eds), Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. 1985. Language and cognitive processes from a developmental perspective. Language and Cognitive Processes 1: 61–95.
Katzenberger, I.. 1994. Cognitive, Linguistic, and Developmental Factors in the Narration of Picture Series. PhD dissertation, Tel Aviv University. (in Hebrew)
Malvern, D. D., Richards, B. J., Chipere, N. & Durán, P.. 2004. Lexical Diversity and Language Development: Quantification and Assessment. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Maschler, Y.. 2009. Metalanguage in Interaction: Hebrew Discourse Markers [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 181]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Nelson, K.. (ed.). 1986. Event Knowledge: Structure and Function in Development. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Peterson, C. & McCabe, A.. 1983. Developmental Psycholinguistics: Three Ways of Looking at a Child’s Narrative. New York NY: Plenum Press.
Reilly, J. S.. 1992. How to tell a good story: The intersection of language and affect in children's narratives. Journal of Narrative and Life History 2: 355–377.
Reilly, J., Baruch, E., Jisa, H. & Berman, R. A.. 2002. Propositional attitudes in written and spoken language. Written Language and Literacy 5: 185–218.
Share, D. L. & Levin, I.. 1999. Learning to read and write in Hebrew. In Learning to Read and Write, M. Harris & G. Hatano (eds), 89–111. Cambridge: CUP.
Shen, Y. & Berman, R. A.. 1997. From isolated event to action structure: Stages in narrative development. In Studies in the Psychology of Language, Y. Shimron (ed.), 119–145. Jerusalem: Magnes Press. (in Hebrew)
Slobin, D. I.. 1990. The development from child speaker to native speaker. In Cultural psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development, J. W. Stigler, R. A. Shweder & G. Herdt (eds), 233–256. Cambridge: CUP.
. 2004. In The many ways to search for a frog: Linguistic typology and the expression of motion events. Relating Events in Narrative: Typological and Contextual Perspectives, S. Strömqvist & L. Verhoeven (eds), 219–259. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Strömqvist, S. & Verhoeven, L.. (eds). 2004. Relating Events in Narrative: Typological and Contextual Perspectives. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Tolchinksy, L. & Salas, N.. In press. Grammar for writing and grammar in writing. In Handbook of Communications Disorders, A. Bar-On & D. Ravid (eds). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Tolchinsky, L. & Sandbank, A.. 2016. Early development of written language in Hebrew. In Acquisition and Development of Hebrew: From Infancy to Adolescence [Trends in Language Acquisition Research 19], R. A. Berman (ed.), 325–352. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Hansen, Mikkel B., Bracha Nir, Christine Simonin & Edy Veneziano
Veneziano, Edy & Eleonora Bartoli
Korecky-Kröll, Katharina, Neriman Dobek, Verena Blaschitz, Sabine Sommer-Lolei, Monika Boniecki, Kumru Uzunkaya-Sharma & Wolfgang U Dressler
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 6 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
