The development of children's adjustment to the interlocutor's knowledge: the expression of causal relations in narratives

Acquiring narrative skills is a developmental process that takes many years and is even not totally accomplished at the end of schooling. From previous studies we know that children as young as 4-5 years can produce descriptive narratives but have difficulties with providing explanatory relations, particularly when they involve the internal states of the characters. We also know that young children can, for example, mark referents' introductions in a way that takes into account the knowledge they share with their interlocutors. Do children adjust in a similar way the degree of causal interconnectedness among events, as well as the explicitness by which these relations are marked, thus providing greater coherence and cohesion to their stories?To answer these questions we compared how 80 French-speaking children aged 4 to 11 years narrate a story on the basis of a sequence of five wordless pictures (the “stone story”), in one of two different situations. (a) 40 children participated in a situation characterised by mutual knowledge and told the story to an “informed” listener ; and (b) 40 children participated in a situation characterised by the absence of mutual knowledge and told the story to an “uninformed” listener. Since explanatory relations are scarce in children's narratives until 9-10 years of age, in order to increase the expression of this evaluative component, we introduced a scaffolding procedure (e.g., Veneziano & Hudelot, 2005). characterised either by mutual knowledge (telling the story to an informed interlocutor) or by the absence of mutual knowledge (telling the story to a “uninformed” listener). However, since explanatory relations are scarce in children's narratives until 9-10 years of age, we introduced a scaffolding procedure that increases children's expression of this evaluative component. More specifically, children were first requested to tell an experimenter the story they understood after having looked at the set of five pictures presented sequentially on a computer's screen when the pictures had faded out (first narrative). Then, in the scaffolding phase, the experimenter asked questions soliciting the reasons of the main events. Finally, children were asked to recount once again the story (second narrative): half of the children told the story to the same experimenter (the “informed” interlocutor), while the other half told it to another experimenter supposed to be uniformed about the story (the “uniformed” interlocutor). The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Results bear on the comparison between the first and the second narratives within and across the two interlocutory contexts. In particular we consider the events that are explained, those explained by the characters' mental states, as well as the way these causal relations are formulated (i.e., the presence or absence of linguistic markers). The discussion focuses on the significance of the adjustments to the state of knowledge of the child's interlocutor for an understanding of the development of theories of mind.