Previous studies of narrative development based on wordless picture stories indicate that before 7–8 years most children provide descriptive narratives with little inferential content such as explanations and attribution of mental states to the story characters. These components find greater expression in studies where children participated in conversations focused on the causes of the events. In the present study, 84 French-speaking children, from kindergarten to second grade, narrated the Stone story (a wordless five-picture story whose plot is based on a misunderstanding between two characters) before and after a short conversational intervention (SCI) focused on the causes of the events, as well as one week later when they also narrated a new story. Thirty additional children served as the Control group: instead of the SCI they played a Memory game with a set of cards containing the pictures of the Stone story. Children in the SCI group increased the inferential content of the narrative produced after the SCI, thus confirming with a larger sample findings obtained in previous studies. Moreover, results provide new evidence that the immediate improvements in inferential content were still present after a week’s delay and could also be applied to a new story. All narratives produced after the SCI were also longer and contained more markers of causality. The effect was stronger in first and second graders than in kindergarten children. By contrast, no significant improvements were found in the children of the Control group on any of the measures. Such results highlight the effectiveness of the SCI in promoting children’s narrative skills, its usefulness in their assessment, and have important implications for a better understanding of narrative development.

中文翻译：

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提升5至8岁说法语的孩子的叙事技巧：简短的对话干预的效果

以前基于无言图画故事的叙事发展研究表明，在7至8岁之前，大多数儿童提供的描述性叙事几乎没有推论性内容，例如对故事人物的心理状态的解释和归因。这些成分在孩子们参与针对事件原因的对话的研究中表现出更大的表达。在本研究中，从幼儿园到二年级的84名讲法语的孩子在简短的对话干预（SCI）前后，叙述了斯通故事（无言的五幅图画故事，其情节基于两个字符之间的误解）关于事件发生的原因，以及一个星期后，他们还讲述了一个新故事。另有30个孩子作为对照组：他们不使用SCI，而是使用一组包含Stone故事图片的卡片玩记忆游戏。SCI组中的儿童增加了SCI之后产生的叙述的推论内容，因此可以用先前研究中获得的更大样本发现来证实。而且，结果提供了新的证据，证明推论内容的即时改进在经过一周的延迟之后仍然存在，并且也可以应用于新故事。SCI之后产生的所有叙述都更长，并且包含更多因果关系标记。一年级和二年级的效果比幼儿园的孩子要强。相比之下，对照组的孩子在任何一项措施上均未见明显改善。这些结果凸显了SCI在提升儿童叙事技巧方面的有效性，