The Development of Narrative Skills in Turkish-Speaking Children: A Complexity Approach

Narrative is a complex discourse unit. Creating it requires “a joint process of event comprehension and language production” (Trabasso & Rodkin, 1994, p.87), and perspective taking, understanding and explaining behaviors and emotions of others. In the present study, it is claimed that these requirements map onto three levels of complexity: 1) Plot complexity reflecting the temporal and thematic organization of the narrative, 2) Syntactic complexity expressing the coherent causal, temporal and logical order of the reported events, and 3) Evaluative complexity indicating the narrator’s perspective toward the events. The aim of the present study was to examine the development in each level and their relationships with each other. Moreover, the contribution of Theory of Mind (ToM), executive function and the comprehension of complex syntactic structures to each level was analyzed. One hundred and five Turkish-speaking children in 4 age groups (3&4, 5,7&8, and 10&11years) and 15 adults participated in 1.Elicitation of narratives task, 2. Emotional Stroop Task, 3. First(for 3to 4-year-old children) and Second-order (for older children and adults) ToM tasks, 4. Real-apparent emotion task (for 3to 4-year-old children), and 5. Comprehension of complement clauses task. As expected, preliminary results indicated developmental increases in plot complexity. Evaluative complexity and syntactic complexity were found to be positively related. Moreover, all levels of complexity correlated with executive function and plot complexity was also related to the comprehension of sentential complements. ToM was not related to any level of complexity. The significance of these findings for the development of narrative skills will be discussed.