Artfulness in Young Children's Spoken Narratives

Research Findings: Artfulness is rarely considered as an indicator of quality in young children's spoken narratives. Although some studies have examined artfulness in the narratives of children 5 and older, no studies to date have focused on the artfulness of preschoolers' oral narratives. This study examined the artfulness of fictional spoken narratives produced by 43 children aged 3 and 4. Each preschooler's narrative was coded using a 15-code system adapted from previous studies of artfulness in school-age children's narratives. These elements of children's narratives were compared to 3 traditional measures of narrative quality: complexity (mean length of T-units), productivity (total number of T-units), and lexical diversity (number of different words). In addition, the relations between children's narrative artfulness and their performance on a standardized measure of general language ability were examined. Results showed a wide range of code use across the sample. Narrative artfulness positively correlated with narrative complexity, productivity, lexical diversity, as well as standardized measures of general language ability. In addition, artfulness captured a significant portion of variability in children's language ability otherwise left unexplained by traditional narrative measures alone. Practice or Policy: These findings suggest that artfulness is a relevant factor and a valid indicator of quality in young children's narratives.