How narrative competence develops from preschool to school-age period: a study with Italian children

The onset of the use of narratives represents a fundamental step in an advanced phase of language development. Indeed, to tell or to understand a story, a child must be able to consider and integrate linguistic, cognitive, and social abilities (Boudreau & Chapman, 2000; Karmiloff & Karmiloff-Smith, 2001). Moreover, narratives evaluation is seen by several authors as a “naturalistic” approach in the study of language development, because narratives represent a real and contextualized request for children (Schraeder, Quinn, Stockman & Miller, 1999). Narrative’s analysis, considering the several competences needed to tell a story, allows a multilevel approach in the study of language development. The dissertation presents four studies conducted within this PhD project which aims at deepen the knowledge of narrative competence in children, through a multilevel approach. The first chapter presents a new tool developed for the assessment of narrative competence, the Narrative Competence Task (NCT). It presents a scoring system based on the vast literature on this topic and that aims to be usable both in research and in the clinical field. Finally, it shows the NCT’s validity in analysing the development of narrative competence in children from 3 to 8 years. The second chapter aims of to analyse gestural and verbal production when preschool-aged children are telling a story (NCT). The focus is to describe the gestures used by children and the relationships between the use of gestures and measures of narrative’s competence. The communicative functions of the gestures is considered to determine whether gestures play an essential role in the narrative production of preschool-aged children or if they serve only an enrichment role. The third chapter includes three studies focused on intonation during story-telling: Study 1 investigates longitudinally in a group of preschool children the relationships among narrative skills, syntax, and prosody; Study 2 describes the intonation used in narratives by children and adults within the Autosegmental-Metrical framework, a model recently adopted in the international filed but not yet been used in studies of Italian children’s intonation; finally, Study 3 investigates the prosody of children and adults’ narratives as a cue of pre-planning. The fourth chapter focuses on the relationships between narrative competence and reading and writing abilities. Specifically, the aim is to verify the possible associations among different aspects of narrative competence and reading and writing abilities, considering both the automatisms (decoding and spelling) and the more complex aspects of learning (text comprehension and production), in the first three years of primary school attendance. Taken together the studies presented in the dissertation highlight the potentialities of narratives in the study of language development and, through the multilevel approach in its study, deepen our knowledge on language acquisition during the preschool and school-age period and its relationships with general cognitive development.