REVIEW ARTICLE - Relating Events in Narrative: A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study (see abstract of review; also see abstract 9409615)

A review of Relating Events in Narrative: A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study (Berman, R., & Slobin, D. [Eds], Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1994) summarizes the findings of this cross-linguistic study of the development of connected narrative discourse in child first-language acquisition of English, German, Spanish, Hebrew, & Turkish. The five functional categories chosen for study were temporality, event conflation, perspective, connectivity, & narrative style. A description of the book's contents indicates that successive treatment was given to the development of functions, linguistic forms, & form-function relations. Among the conclusions are that (1) it is misleading to generalize about the acquisition of particular structures on the basis of use in a single language & type of discourse, (2) speakers do not often make use of linguistic options that differ from the norm in their native language, (3) sequencing problems occurred for children regardless of language background in the 3:6-4:6 age range, & (4) psychological causality predominates in personal narratives of children after age 4:0. It is observed that the volume is lengthy, ranging over an enormity of materials & ideas; despite this, instances of incomplete treatment, eg, connectives are found. 12 References. B. Gadalla