Effects of age and stimulus material on character introductions of Swedish-speaking four- to six-year-olds

This study investigates effects of age on character introductions in the oral narratives of seventy-two monolingual Swedish-speaking four- to six-year-olds, comparing results from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN; Gagarina et al., 2012, 2015), and the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument (ENNI; Schneider et al., 2005). The proportion of appropriate referring expressions for introducing story characters clearly increases from age four to six. However, the children's performance is strongly stimulus-dependent. All age groups perform better on MAIN than on ENNI. One should thus be careful when drawing conclusions about the age at which children are able to use referring expressions appropriately.