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Social Environment and Cognition in Language Development: Studies in honor of Ayhan Aksu-Koç
Edited by F. Nihan Ketrez, Aylin C. Küntay, Şeyda Özçalışkan and Aslı Özyürek
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 21] 2017
► pp. 199–222

Chapter 13
Developing construals of a narrative event sequence

| Tel Aviv University, Israel

The chapter examines Hebrew-language excerpts relating to a particular episode in the “frog-story” picture book following on from Aksu-Koç and Tekdemir’s (2004) study of “the interplay between narrativity and mindreading.” Verbalizations of Hebrew-speaking preschoolers and school children compared with adults provide further evidence for the complex interweaving of cognitive and linguistic knowledge in development of narrative abilities. Young preschool children show native-like command of clause-level grammar and lexicon, but fail to recognize the protagonist’s misconception whereas by school-age, participants invariably correctly identify the objects depicted graphically by the author-illustrator. Findings are discussed in terms of the developing ability to recognize this complex interrelation between events and to verbalize them in linguistically appropriate terms.

Keywords: Hebrew, misconception, narrative development, picture-deciphering, verbal backtracking
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Results
    • 2.1Preschoolers aged 3 to 6 years
    • 2.2Schoolchildren aged 7 to 12 Years
    • 2.3Mature adult renderings
  • 3.Discussion
  • Acknowledgment
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 18 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.21.13ber
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