The impact of children’s lexical and morphosyntactic knowledge on narrative competence development: A prospective cohort study

Abstract

The authors investigate the contribution of children's early comprehension of relational terms and morphosyntactic knowledge to the development of narrative competence in kindergarten and Grade 1. Narrative competence was assessed through the cohesion, coherence, and structure of children’s productions. The participants in this study were 714 Italian children. The authors measured their oral narrative competence through a storytelling task at the beginning and end of the kindergarten year. A total of 115 children were randomly selected and followed through Grade 1, and their narrative competence was measured again. According to the path analysis model, early morphosyntactic knowledge contributes to explain narrative competence in Grade 1. Early comprehension of relational terms contributes to narrative competence at the end of the school year. These findings confirm the importance of exploring the influence of early language skills on narrative competence development and suggests early intervention at the level of language antecedents of narrative competence.

Keywords:

• Narrative competence
• morphosyntactic knowledge
• comprehension of relational terms

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giuliana Pinto

Giuliana Pinto, is Full Professor in Psychology (Department of Education, Languages, Intercultures, Literatures and Psychology, University of Florence, Italy. Her main research areas are linguistic and cognitive development and symbolic development. She focused on children's emergent literacy and learning of reading and writing, both in typical and atypical development; on how narrative develops with age, and on interrelationships between the development of narrative, vocabulary, phonological and notational awareness. She also studied representational development, picture-production, the conceptual change in children’s beliefs about pictures, their theory of pictures. Recent publications include refereed journal papers and chapters in international volumes.

Christian Tarchi

Christian Tarchi, PhD, is a Researcher in Educational Psychology (Department of Education, Languages, Intercultures, Literatures and Psychology, University of Florence, Italy). His research focuses on learning and instruction, with a specific interest on reading comprehension (of single and multiple texts), critical thinking, literacy acquisition, and narrative competence. His work has been published in referred journals, as well as presented at international conferences.

Lucia Bigozzi

Lucia Bigozzi is Associate Professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology at University of Florence, Italy. Her research interests include writing and language processes in children with language difficulties, learning disabilities, literacy and numeracy. Her work has been published in referred journals, as well as presented at international conferences.