The development of children's and preadolescent's narratives

The aim of this study is to explore the development of children’s narratives in three different contexts that are favorable to the production of (self-)narratives: (i) at home with parent(s), (ii) at school with peers and (iii) with a researcher in psychology. 136 children aged from 3 to 13 have been recorded 50 minutes in each situation.
Once transcribed, the data were morphosyntactically annotated and processed using multivariate exploratory techniques, including Correspondence Analysis, Principal Component and Classification Analysis. The results we obtained first demonstrated that contextual indicators were more significant than age in narrative production: conversations with parents were significantly more interactive whereas interactions between children turned out to be more regressive (i.e. simplified vocabulary, demonstrative pronouns). The situation with the psychologist was the one leading to the more elaborate narratives, as children seem to show greater language control with unfamiliar adults.
However, age naturally impacts the linguistic complexity of narratives, both on the lexical and morphosyntactic levels. The results we obtained enabled us to observe a gradation in the complexity of textual productions, setting the roots of the future self-narratives the subjects will be able to develop later, during adolescence.
Thus, the findings show different and significant aspects of the development of narratives and self-narratives in children’s speech, considering age and context. Last but not least, they also suggest the relevance of the application of text statistics methods to clinical psychology.