The construction of textual cohesion in narrative texts: evidence from different tasks by Italian children from 4 to 10 years old

This work focuses on the way Italian informants of different ages (4, 7, and 10 year old children and adults) build discourse cohesion and thematic coherence with respect to two different narrative tasks. The data was collected using the video clip The Finite Story (Dimroth, 2006) and a sequence of 30 pictures composing a story (created by C. Dimroth as well). The characteristic of these two tasks is to involve a non prototypical flux of information since the episodes to retell force speakers to continually contrast entities, time spans and positive or negative polarities, besides of course maintaining or reintroducing the reference to some of the preceding referential domains. These tasks should force speakers to employ anaphoric means such as additive particles, temporal adverbs, polarity markings and prosodic strategies etc. This work will essentially explore three subjects: a. the cognitive processes guiding Italian children’s narrations at the different ages considered here, and consequently the different comprehension they have of the tasks proposed; b. the linguistic means children use to make the text cohesive; c. the influence of the typological specificities of Italian language on points (a) and (b). The results will be compared, as far as the available studies make it possible, to the ones relative to children of the same age learning German, Polish and French.