Children's ability to restore the referential cohesion of stories

Abstract

Children's ability to restore discourse cohesion was examined in three experiments. Children of 5, 7 and 10 years heard stories containing referring expressions that constituted inappropriate first or subsequent mentions of referents from the point of view of story cohesion. They were asked to retell these stories (Experiment I), to repeat verbatim some clauses extracted from them on line (Experiment II), as well as to actively detect and judge anomalies on line (Experiment III). Children's retellings and their integrative repetition errors in Experiments I and II show that they could modify inappropriate expressions into appropriate ones at all ages, despite age differences suggesting an increasing tendency to link NPs in discourse after 5 years. In comparison, only the 10-year-olds could explicitly comment on anomalies in Experiment III. In conclusion, children show a surprisingly early ability to restore cohesion, an increasingly automatized reliance on discourse context with age, and a late metalinguistic awareness of the cohesive functions of different noun phrase types.