Lithuanian narrative language at preschool age

Abstract

The paper deals with the main linguistic indications of Lithuanian preschoolers’ narratives. The analysis is based on experimental data of 24 typically developing monolingual Lithuanian children (6–7 years of age) from middle-class families, attending a state kindergarten in Kaunas (Lithuania). During the experiment, the children were asked to tell a story according to the Cat Story (Hickmann 1993) picture sequence. The stories were recorded, transcribed and annotated for an automatic analysis using CHILDES software. During the analysis, the syntactic complexity, lexical diversity, and general productivity (MLUw and type/token ratio) of the narratives were investigated. The results indicated the main microstructural tendencies of Lithuanian narrative language at preschool age.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5128/ERYa8.02

Keywords

• narrative analysis
• child language
• language acquisition
• Lithuanian