Linguistic character marking in children's narrative discourse

Razvoj jezičnih sposobnosti zahtijeva od djeteta usvajanje pragmatičkih načela koja upravljaju organiziranjem obavijesti u iskazu i stvaraju kohezivni diskurs. S psiholingvističkoga gledišta to znači da treba istražiti kako djeca ovladavaju jezičnom organizacijom na rečeničnoj i diskursnoj razini. Jezična se organizacija obavijesti u diskursu, promatra kroz likove, vrijeme i prostor priče. Cilj je rada ispitati način na koji djeca označuju likove u priči. Rad je odgovorio na pitanja o tome kako djeca različite dobi prvi put uvode lik u priču, kako uspostavljaju novu informaciju koja zatim tijekom pričanja postaje dana. Utvrdilo se postoje li razlike u označavanju likova između djece različitih dobnih skupina te postoje li razlike u označavanju likova na lokalnoj i globalnoj razini dječje priče. Dječja sposobnost pripovijedanja ispitana je uporabom slikovnice Frog, where are you? (Mayer, 1969.). Uzorak ispitanika činilo je ukupno 120 jednojezične djece govornika hrvatskoga jezika. Dobne skupine činili su četverogodišnjaci, šestogodišnjaci, osmogodišnjaci i desetogodišnjaci. Ispitivanje je obuhvatilo jednak broj ispitanika iz svake dobne skupine (30) i podjednak broj dječaka i djevojčica iako spolne razlike nisu bile posebno analizirane. Dobiveni tonski zapisi transkribirani su u CHAT-u i analizirani u programu CLAN. Iako se pretpostavljalo da je dječje oslanjanje na različite jezične strukture kada obilježuju likove povezano i s formalnim i funkcionalnim svojstvima jezika, za ovaj su rad važnija funkcionalna pragmatička načela. Pokušalo se dokazati da djeca moraju proći određene razvojne razine pri usvajanju vještina organizacije pripovjednoga diskursa te da pri tome postoje individualne razlike unutar istih dobnih skupina ispitanika.In order to develop their language skills, children need to acquire the pragmatic notions which control the organization of information in an utterance and create a cohesive discourse. From a psycholinguistic point of view, this means that it is necessary to research how children become linguistically competent in sentence and discourse organization. Language organization of information in a discourse is observed through characters, time and place of the story. This paper aims to investigate the way children mark story characters. It was investigated how children at various ages introduce a character into the narrative and how they give a new information which becomes given in the process of narration. It was determined whether or not children at various ages mark characters differently and whether there are differences between character marking at local and at global level in a narrative. A wordless picture book Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969) was used to determine children’s narrative abilities. There were all together 120 unilingual participants. They were all speakers of Croatian at the ages of four, six, eight and ten. The experiment included equal number of children (30) at each age group regardless to their gender. Gathered audio tracks are transcribed in CHAT and analysed in CLAN Program. When marking characters children rely on various language structures, which is the result of both formal and functional principles in language. However, the functional principle appears to be more relevant for the purposes of the paper, in particular its pragmatic aspect. The attempt was made to prove that children have to go through certain development stages while acquiring narrative discourse skills and that there are some individual differences within same age groups