The Pausing Strategies in Chinese Preschool Children's Narratives

Abstract

Purpose: Language production, a dynamic process involving real-time language processing, is crucial for children's language and communication development. To explore the early development of children's real-time language production, this study investigated Chinese preschool children's pausing strategies in narratives and their associations with verbal working memory and vocabulary abilities. Method: A picture-elicited narrative task was employed. Sixty Mandarin-speaking children aged 4–5 years were asked to tell a story according to the book Frog, Where Are You? The pausing types and positions in narratives were coded and analyzed. Additionally, children's verbal working memory and vocabulary were measured. Results: The results showed that 4- to 5-year-old children prefer to use silent pauses and tend to produce pauses within clauses. The total frequency of pausing decreases with age and shows a significant gender difference. Girls prefer to use within-clause pauses, whereas boys prefer to use between-clause pauses. More importantly, children's pausing frequency is closely associated with their verbal working memory and vocabulary, in which working memory plays a more important role. Conclusions: This study is a first-step exploration of pausing strategies in 4- to 5-year-old Chinese children's narratives. The developmental characteristics of pausing strategies shown in typically developing children serve as a crucial reference for interventions for children with language deficits.