engleski

Referential choice in ambiguous narrative discourse

Introduction Speakers require the basic narrative skill of unambiguous reference marking to make their stories understandable to listeners. During narration, speakers constantly choose the appropriate linguistic form (nominals or pronominals) for successful narration. How they refer to characters depends on speaker age as well as factors in the narrative, including the number and gender of the characters. Discourse- or listener-oriented approaches make different predictions about referential behaviour in cognitively demanding situations (e.g. Arnold, Benetto and Diehl 2009, cf. Hendriks at al. 2014): the first predicts a higher number of nominals ; the second, a higher number of pronominals. To examine which of these approaches may be more appropriate, the current study explores referential forms chosen by children and adults, monolingual speakers of Croatian, under increased cognitive load (three-character story). Method Using a less ambiguous set of picture stimuli in which characters differ in gender (Baby Birds) and a more ambiguous set in which all have the same gender (Baby Goats), both from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) (Gagarina et al. 2012), narrative samples were elicited from 60 children (6 ; 5-8 ; 0) and 60 adults. Results and discussion For both ambiguity levels, children and adults alike used nominals (M=69%, SD=16.449 ; M=61%, SD=15.551) more than pronominals, with children using a higher percentage of nominals than adults (U=1022, p<.05). In contrast to children, adults' choice of pronominals or nominals depended on ambiguity: they used more pronominals in the less ambiguous story compared to the more ambiguous story (M=38%, SD=13.81 vs. M=26%, SD=17.300) (U=432, p<.05). These findings suggest that referencing in cognitively demanding (multi- character) stories occurs preferentially through nominals, which supports the discourse-oriented approach. Adults may make referential choices differently according to the level of ambiguity.

child language, narratives, story complexity, referential choice

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