A Longitudinal Investigation of Mandarin-speaking Preschoolers' Relation of Events in Narratives: From Unrelated to Related Events

Abstract

This study focuses on the way preschoolers relate events in a story. Twelve Mandarin-speaking preschoolers served as subjects; their narratives were elicited through the use of a picture book, Frog, where are you? Our data suggest that children’s progression from treating single, unrelated events to related ones requires proper linguistic and cognitive capacities. The data also support earlier findings that most 5-year-olds are not able to relate a chain of events well. Additionally, it is found that there is dissociation in abilities for producing linguistic expressions and for inferring relations between events. We try to interpret the dissociation in terms of Karmiloff-Smith’s problem-solving model.

Keywords

• unrelated events
• related events
• Mandarin-speaking preschoolers