Abstract

Two common elicitation methods to measure children’s narrative skills are story retelling, where children listen to a model story that they retell, and story generation, where children are not provided with a model. However, it is largely unknown how the task influences the quality of referential links throughout the story. In this talk, we discuss two possible hypotheses: First, listening to a model story may have a positive influence on the quality of the referential links, in line with results for other narrative skills. In this case, we would expect referring expressions in the retelling task to be better matched to the referent’s salience level (roughly speaking: indefinite NPs for referent introduction, definite NPs for referent reintroduction, and pronouns for referent maintenance). Second, retelling may cause a familiarity effect on referring expression production. That is, the model story causes the story characters to become salient to the child before the narration starts, which may lead to referring expressions signaling a higher salience level than is appropriate for the addressee. If this is the case, we would expect for example an increase in definite NPs for referent introduction and/or use of pronouns for referent reintroduction. We present preliminary results of a study testing these predictions, in which we elicited two narratives from 74 Swedish-speaking children aged 6 and 8, one using a telling task and one using a retelling task