What's in a Narrative? Variation in Storytelling at the Interface Between Language and Literacy

Due to the several factors involved in narrative production, it comes as no surprise that one of the most common features observed across studies is the extreme variation in speakers’ narrative outcomes (Veneziano & Nicolopoulou 2019). Therefore, any investigation aiming to understand how one or the other factor contributes to this variation should be able to control for additional interacting factors, while allowing the ones of interest to change. The aim of the present volume is to identify some of these factors of variation, by addressing the following questions:

1.How does the type of elicitation task affect variation in narrative production by native and non-native speakers? Which features of the elicitation tasks are more relevant in determining this variation?

2.To what extent do child narratives reflect the story-telling practices in the society in which they live?

3.How do cross-linguistic effects shape the production of different narrative components by bilingual speakers and second language learners? Does the impact of cross-linguistic influence vary depending on the target structure to be acquired?

4.Which components of narrative production are sensitive to which cognitive variables? What is the relationship between cognitive development and the emergence of narrative skills?

Each contribution relates to one or more of these questions, as we will show in the following overview of the single chapters.

In Chapter 1, Designing and compiling a learner corpus of written and spoken narratives: The Corpus of English as a Foreign Language (COREFL), Cristóbal Lozano, Ana-Díaz-Negrillo and Marcus Callies provide best practice guidelines on how to design learner corpora of written and spoken narratives, by describing the main features of the COREFL corpus. Due to their contextualized nature, corpus data serve as a window into learners’ narrative skills from different aspects (such as the production of referring expressions) and are useful instruments to complement more controlled (and hence less contextualized) experimental data. By triangulating information about learners’ profiles (in terms of their L1, proficiency in the L2 and learning contexts) with a variety of tasks (e.g., different types of oral and written narratives) and matched data from control groups of native speakers, the analysis of corpus data allows to identify several factors that contribute to variation in learners’ outcomes, ranging from cross-linguistic and second language acquisition patterns to task effects.

In Chapter 3, What’s in an adult story? – Modality effects on the narrative productions of adult Germans, Eva Knopp compares the production of oral and written narratives of different complexity by German monolingual adults. The author analyses adults’ oral and written narratives from different points of view, including macrostructure (e.g., story grammar and use of mental state terms) and microstructure measures (e.g., syntactic complexity and argument shifting in reference production) and shows that only certain features of narrative production are affected by modality. Furthermore, story complexity often interacts with modality effects. These findings put in perspective what has often been claimed in the literature (more as an assumption than an empirical result), i.e., that written narratives are linguistically more complex than oral ones, mainly because of greater planning times. A more differential picture – which takes into account different narrative components and degrees of story-complexity – emerges from this study.

In Chapter 4, Children’s narratives in Papua New Guinea: A case study of Qaqet, Birgit Hellwig discusses the cross-linguistic validity of traditional instruments of narrative elicitation (such as the Frog Story), by reporting on her observations related to narrative production among Qaqet-speaking children of Papua New Guinea. The children’s Frog Stories collected by the author reflect the narrative practices of the society, being constructed collaboratively between the child and her interlocutor, as well as the narrative style of adult narratives (e.g., use of repetitions for reference chains and narrative setting in the here and now). These observations suggest that children’s narrative assessment in non-Western societies cannot be carried out following the same methodologies and criteria for analysis as in Western societies, but should take into account the narrative and literacy practices of the sociocultural context.

In Chapter 6, Reference patterns in language comprehension & production: the “Greek case”, Despina Papadopoulou presents a state-of-the-art of different studies on reference production and comprehension with a special focus on Greek adult native speakers. She argues in favour of a multi-factorial approach to reference production and comprehension, considering both the factors that previous studies have shown to affect a referent’s discourse accessibility (such as the argument and information status of its antecedent) together with less studied factors, such as the prosody of referring expressions and the overall discourse structure. The author accounts for the different patterns of results displayed across the reviewed studies both in terms of the different experimental methodologies that have been used or of the different cognitive mechanisms that underlie reference production and comprehension. She also considers the role of cross-linguistic differences and developmental effects in determining how a certain type of referring expression (i.e., a null subject) may be associated with different discourse functions (e.g., reference to a subject or an object antecedent) across languages or across the lifespan.