Using connectives in oral French narratives: Cognitive constraints and development of narrative skills

This study deals with the use of connectives in oral French narration. Sevento eleven-year-old native speakers of French told ‘silent’ comic strip stories involving two characters to a same-age peer. The comic strips differed from each other in the display mode (consecutive vs. simultaneous), the type of event sequence (arbitrary vs. ordered) and the thematic continuity (continuous vs. discontinuous). The analysis concerns the part of the children’s narrations where the same character carried out a sequence of actions. The results showed that: (1) more connectives were used when the speaker could see all the pictures at once; (2) regardless of the type of sequence, connectives that marked a temporal link outnumbered all others; and (3) thematic continuity promoted temporal-link marking by 7-year-olds and causal-link marking by 11-year-olds. The discussion addresses the conceptual determinants of the use of connectives, particularly temporal markers, and the developmental findings obtained by manipulating the conditions of production.