Development of narratives in Tamil-speaking preschool children: A task comparison study

'Narrative' can be simply defined as a spoken or written account of connected events or experiences. The present study records the development of microstructure elements of narratives in 200 typically developing Tamil-speaking children aged between three years and six years and eleven months. It then compares their narrative productivity across two elicitation contexts: story retelling (SR) and story generation (SG). The samples thus obtained are analyzed for three narrative microstructure parameters, namely total number of words (TNW) in the narrative, mean length of utterances (MLU) and the number of utterances. The results reveal an increasing trend in all three microstructure parameters across both contexts. All three parameters are found to be quantitatively high in SR than in SG. Variation in the performance in these narrative tasks has been explained with behavioural observations from literature, cognitive architecture and a working memory model. It was found that gender differences do not follow a uniform pattern across age groups and elicitation contexts. Since the study has generated normative data for microstructure parameters of narratives, the observations can be used to analyze language deviance and help plan the narrative intervention protocol for language therapy.