Intra-individual and developmental variation in children’s narratives: Studies in intervention

International audienceIn this talk we present a number of studies that have used a causal-oriented conversation as an intervention procedure and sequences of five wordless pictures depicting a misunderstanding between two characters, an adaptation of the “Stone Story” and analogous stories created for our project.French-speaking children narrated the same story before and after the causal-oriented conversation or the simple exposition to the pictures, without any conversation. All results point to the fact that after the conversation, and only after that, children significantly increased the overall coherence and mind-oriented causal plot of their story, and produced more markers of causality. Improvements were not limited to the themes focused in the conversation but involved references to internal states, including false belief, and to the characters’ viewpoints on the events. Improvements were found to be stable and generalizable to analogous storie0s. Effects were visible from 6 years on. Results will be discussed within cognitive and pragmatic frameworks. The usefulness of the causal-oriented conversational intervention in the assessment of children’s narrative skills and in the understanding of narrative development more in general will be underline