Dalla competenza sintattica alla competenza testuale: le narrazioni dei bambini italofoni dai 4 ai 10 anni


Abstract


The paper investigates the way Italian children of different ages manage syntactic and narrative competence in Italian L1. The data were elicited by the story Frog, where are you?, created in 1969 by Mercer Meyer and extensively used in several L1 and L2 studies. The study aims at identifying the cognitive prerequisites on which linguistic development is founded at the ages investigated (4, 7 and 10) together with the language specific influence that Italian may have on the way children conceptualize and express information throughout a narrative text. Some crosslinguistic questions are finally considered in order to compare our results with those concerning languages other than Italian.

 


DOI Code: 10.1285/i22390359v36p91

Keywords: narrative competence; textual cohesion; syntactic packaging; crosslinguistic comparison; language specific tendencies.

References


Benazzo S., Dimroth C., Perdue C. and Watorek M. 2004, Le rôle des particules additives dans la construction de la cohésion discursive en langue maternelle et en langue étrangère, in “Langages” 155, pp. 76-104.

Berman R. and Slobin I. D. 1994, Relating Events in Narrative: a Crosslinguistic Developmental Study, Psychology Press, New York/London.

Bowerman M. 1996, Learning how to structure space for language, in Bloom P., Peterson M. A., Nadel L. and Garrett M. F. (eds.), Language and Space, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 385-436.

Choi S., McDonough L., Bowerman M. and Mandler J.M. 1999, Early sensitivity to language-specific spatial categories in English and Corean, in “Cognitive Development” 14, pp. 241-268.

Diessel H. and Tomasello M. 2000, The development of relative clauses in spontaneous child speech, in “Cognitive Linguistics” 11, pp. 131-151.

Fayol M. 1985, Le Récit et Sa Construction. Une Approche de Psychologie Cognitive, Delachaux & Niestlé Editeurs, Neuchâtel/Paris.

Giacalone Ramat A. (a cura di) 2003, Verso l’Italiano, Carocci, Roma.

Giuliano P. 2006, Abilità Narrativa ed Emarginazione Sociale, Liguori, Napoli [2a ed.].

Giuliano P. 2012a, Discourse cohesion in narrative texts: the role of additive means in Italian L1 and L2, in Watorek M., Benazzo S. and Hickmann M. (eds.), Comparative Perspectives to Language Acquisition: A tribute to Clive Perdue, Multilingual Matters, Bristol, pp. 375-400.

Giuliano P. 2012b, The construction of textual cohesion in narrative texts: evidence from different tasks by Italian children from 4 to 10 years old, in “Linguistica e Filologia” 32, pp. 7-49.

Giuliano P. 2013, Comparaison de phénomènes complexes en italien et en français chez des adolescents bilingues et monolingues: focus sur le texte narratif, in “Travaux de Linguistique” 66, pp. 73-96.

Giuliano P. 2014, La compétence narrative en Italien L1: une confrontation entre adolescents marginalisés et adolescents issus d’un milieu privilégié, in “Approche Neuropsychologique des Apprentissages chez l’Enfant” 124, pp. 288-296.

Giuliano P. 2015, How children ‘add’ or ‘restrict’ entities and temporal spans in narrations: evidence from Italian and English native children, in “Linguistik online” 71, pp. 81-102.

Giuliano P. and Musto S. 2016, Assertive strategies in English and Spanish: a contribution to the debate on assertion in Romance and Germanic languages, in “Testi e Linguaggi” 9, pp. 228-242.

Giuliano P. and Musto S. 2018, The construction of textual cohesion in Spanish and Italian, as mother tongues and as foreign languages, in “Lingue e Linguaggi” 26, pp. 235-257.

Giuliano, P. and Anastasio, S., in corso di valutazione, The Italian and English perspectives in narrations: evidence from retellings of native speakers and L2 learners, in “Studi Italiani di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata”.

Givón T. 1995, Functionalism and Grammar, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.

Guasti M.T. 2002, The Growth of Grammar, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Hendricks H. 1999, The acquisition of temporal reference in first and second language acquisition: what children already know and adults still have to learn and vice versa, in “Psychology of Language and Communication ” 3 [1], pp. 41-60.

Hickmann M. 1995, Discourse organisation and the development of reference to person, space and time, in Fletcher P. and MacWhinney B. (eds), The Handbook of Child Language, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 194-218.

Hickmann M., Hendriks H., Roland F. and Liang J. 1996, The marking of new information in children’s narratives: a comparison of English, French, German and Mandarin Chinese, in “Journal of Child Language” 23, pp. 591-619.

Hickmann M. 2004, Le développement de la cohésion dans la narration orale chez l’enfant: perspectives inter-langues, in “Calap” 24, pp. 13-31.

Klein W. and von Stutterheim C. 1989 Referential movement in discriptive and narrative discourse, in Dietrich R. e Granmann C. F. (eds), Language Processing in Social Context, Elsevier Science Publishers B. V., Amsterdam, pp. 39-76.

Klein W. and Stutterheim C. Von. 1991, Text structure and referential movement, in “Sprache und Pragmatik” 22, pp. 1-32.

Martinot C. 2010, Reformulation et acquisition de la complexité linguistique, in “Travaux de linguistique” 61, pp. 63-96.

Nezworsky T., Stein N. L. and Trabasso T. 1982, Story structure versus content in children’s recall, in “Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour” 21, pp. 196-206.

Slobin D. I. 1973, Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar, in Ferguson C. A. and Slobin D. I. (eds.), Studies of Child Language Development, Holt Rinheartand Winston, New York, pp. 175-208.

Slobin D. I. 1991, Learning to think for speaking. Native language, cognition and rhetorical style, in “Pragmatics” 1, pp. 7-29.

Slobin D. I. 1996, From ‘Thought and language’ to ‘thinking for speaking’, in Gumperz J. and Levinson S. (eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity: Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language, Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 70-96.

Slobin D. I. 1997, Mind, code and text, in Bybee J., Haiman J. and Thompson S.A. (eds.), Essays on Language Function and Language Type. Dedicated to T. Givón, John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp. 437-467.

Slobin D. I. 2003, Language and thought online: Some consequences of linguistic relativity, in Gentner D. and Goldin Meadow S. (eds.), Language in Mind: Advances in the Investigation of Language and Thought, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 157-191.

Slobin D. I. 2004, The many ways to search for a frog: linguistic typology and the expression in motion events in Strömqvist S. and Verhoeven L. (eds.), Relating Events in Narrative: Typological and Contextual Perspectives, LEA, Mahwah, NJ, pp. 219-257.

Sornicola R. 1981, Sul Parlato, Il Mulino, Bologna.

Stein L. N. and Glenn Ch. G. 1979, An analysis of story comprehension in elementary school children, in Freedle R. O. (ed.), Advances in Discourse Processes. New Directions in Discourse Processing, Ablex, Norwood, NJ, II, 53-120.

Trabasso T. and Sperry L. L. 1985, Causal relatedness and importance of story events, in “Journal of Memory and Language” 24, 595-611.

Trabasso T., Van Den Broek P. and Young Suh S. 1989, Logical necessity and transitivity of causal relations in stories, in “Discourse Processes” 22, pp. 1-25.

Tomasello T., 2000, Do young children have adult syntactic competence?, in “Cognition” 74, pp. 209-253.

Watorek M. (a cura di) 2004, “Langages” 55.


Full Text: pdf

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribuzione - Non commerciale - Non opere derivate 3.0 Italia License.