SPEECH FEATURES by

The content and language structure of stories created by young children have been for many years an interest to re searchers who have attempted to investigate children's think ing as reflected in their stories. These stories, believed to consist of children's actual thoughts during the story creation process, may reflect thinking and can be examined and analyzed according to identified criteria. The five characteristics of plot structures investigated for this study were story length, T-units, words per T-unit, characters, and incidents. Piaget's decreasingly egocentric speech features were causality, logical justification, and sequence. The purposes of this study were first, to examine non conserving and conserving first grade children's oral expression as reflected in their stories, and second, to determine if a relationship existed between characteristic