engleski

Lexical diversity and syntactic complexity in predicting the macrostructure in children’s narratives

Research into development of narrative abilities focuses largely on evaluating children’s cognitive and linguistic knowledge. Cognitive knowledge, as a prerequisite for developing narrative coherence, is assessed on the level of macrostructure. On the level of microstructure, the focus is on assessing vocabulary and morphosyntactic skills using measures of lexical diversity and syntactic complexity. To date, a unique relationship between the abilities on the macro- and microstructure was documented (overview: Aksu- Koş and Aktan-Erciyes, 2018). However, previous studies used different elicitation methods and procedures and did not directly compare the abilities of children of different age. The aim of this study was to test how well different aspects of microstructure predict individual differences in the macrostructure of preschool and school children telling the same story and in the same condition. Two hypotheses were formulated. For preschool children, the results on the measure of lexical diversity will better predict the overall score of macrostructure analysis. For school children, the results on the measure of syntactic complexity will better predict the overall score of macrostructure analysis. Oral narrative samples were collected from 89 typically developing monolingual children speaking Croatian. Children’s language skills were previously assessed using Test for reception of grammar (Bishop, Kuvač Kraljević et al., 2013) and Peabody picture vocabulary test (Dunn and Dunn, Kovačević et al., 2010). Narrative samples were collected using Croatian version of The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN ; Hržica and Kuvač Kraljević, 2012). Microstructure measures included D for lexical diversity and clausal density (CD) and mean length of clause (MLC) for syntactic complexity. Children’s abilities on the macrostructure were assessed using MAIN scoring procedure. Bivariate (Pearson) correlation and hierarchical regression analysis were conducted. In the group of preschool children, only lexical diversity showed a significant unique contribution in explaining the variance of criteria. In the group of school children, syntactic complexity was more predictive in explaining the variance of criteria. Further, only CD was a significant predictor of the macrostructure. This leads to the conclusion that narrative coherence of younger children relies on their lexical abilities, while in school-age the use of complex syntax has more important role.

narratives ; lexical diversity ; syntactic complexity ; coherence ; age differences

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