engleski

Frequency and semantics of connective and in children's narrative discourse

Background. Previous cross-linguistic research within the form-function approach confirmed that connective and encodes various meanings in children’s narrative discourse, thus functioning as a mechanism for the acquisition of new forms and meanings (Berman, 2009). The aim of this study is to examine differences in the overall frequency of connective and as well as the frequency of and establishing different semantic relations in narratives of young monolingual speakers of Croatian. Method. Narrative samples for this study were collected by a picture book Frog, where are you? (Mayer, 1969). There were four groups of participants: G1 (n=30, Mage=4 ; 4), G2 (n=30, Mage=6 ; 4) G3 (n=30, Mage= 8 ; 3) and G4 (n=30, Mage=10 ; 2). Connectives extracted from the narrative samples were classified according to the semantic relations they express: succession, simultaneity, cause-consequence, contrast. Results and conclusion. Overall frequency of and changes with age by shaping the inverse U-curve, i.e. first increases up to the age of 8 and then decreases. A Kruskal-Wallis test revealed a significant difference in the overall frequency of and (p<.01). Further Dunn’s pairwise test showed a significant difference between G1 and G3 (p<.01) and between G3 and G4 (p<.05). The frequency of and in sequential and cause-consequence meaning follows the same developmental path. There were significant differences in the frequency of and in sequential (p<.001) and cause-consequence meaning (p<.001), at least between three groups. Frequency of and in simultaneity reveals a stagnation, followed by a marked increase after the age of 8, with a significant difference between G4 and the other groups (all p<.01). The study builds on previous but adds the analyses of additional semantic relations. Results are consistent with studies of connectives from the cross-linguistic perspective, reporting that complexity in meanings of early cohesive devices gives way to the development of new forms and meanings (review: Akşu-Koç and Aktan-Erciyes, 2018).

child language, narrative skills, connective and

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