THE DEVELOPMENTNT OF NARRATIVE LANGUAGE IN ITALIAN-SPEAKING SCHOOL-AGED CHILDREN

The narratives produced by 75 Italian-speaking children divided in five subgroups ranging from 6.0 to 10.11 years of age were analyzed for age-related changes in microlinguistic and macrolinguistic aspects of discourse processing. Two single-picture stimuli and two cartoon-story sequences were used to elicit four stories per subject. Some aspects of linguistic processing varied linearly across agegroups (Speech Rate, Omission of Content Words, Sentence Completeness, Local Coherence errors, Thematic Informativeness) while some did not change at all (e.g., Words, Phonological Selection, Lexical errors, Errors of global coherence). Storytype (single picture vs. picture sequence) had a significant influence on some macrolinguistic measures. Strong interactions emerged between linguistic abilities as expressed in oral narrative text construction and general levels of intelligence.