Conversing With Toddlers about the Nonpresent Precursors to Narrative Development in Two Genres

Narratives are ubiquitous forms of oral discourse which represent shared cultural understandings of our human experience in the world (Bruner, 1986). Narratives provide an important means for translating experiences into language for purposes of communication (Berman & Slobin, 1994), for representing them in memory (Nelson, 1986), and for structuring and supplementing them with interpretation