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Abstract
This article reports two studies in which the developmental relationship be-tween affective and linguistic expression is explored by comparing the comple-mentary skills of storytelling (performance) and story construction (structure). In the first study, children of the two age groups (3- to 4-year-olds and 6- to 8-year-olds) were shown a picture book, Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1979) and then asked to tell the story. Analyses of the data revealed a striking dif-ference in both story structure and storytelling performance. The older group consistently produced stories of greater length and complexity than those of the younger group; with respect to storytelling performance, however, 3- and 4-year-olds used significantly more affective elements of good storytelling than did the 7- and 8-year-olds. In a second study, ten 7- and 8-year-olds and ten 10- and 11-year-olds retold the same story, but to a 3-year-old. In this con-text, the 10- and 11-year-olds used significantly more affective devices, both linguistic and paralinguistic, than did the 7- and 8-year-olds. Considering both cognitive and discourse perspectives, the developmental implications of these findings are discussed.

Abstract In this study, we compared storytelling of a pictured narrative,Frog, Where Are You?, by 6 Deaf and 6 hearing mothers in American Sign Language (ASL) and in English, respectively. How do these mothers construct their stories, that is, how do they mark episodes? And how do English-speakers' strategies differ from ASL-users' strategies? We found that stories in ASL contained more explicit markers to signal both local and global relations of the narrative. Because of modality and grammatical differences between English and ASL, Deaf mothers seemed to have more strategies available to use. Although the overall pattern of use throughout the story was similar, Deaf mothers appeared to be more "dramatic" in their storytelling than were hearing mothers. Both groups of parents used a variety of markers to call their children's attention to the theme of the story.(Psychology)

Williams syndrome is a rare genetic disorder characterized by a unique physiological and behavioral profile, involving excessive sociability and relatively spared linguistic abilities in spite of mild to moderate mental retardation. The present study examines the narrative development of children with Williams syndrome and, for the first time, compares their performance to typically developing chronological-age matched children to examine the development of both structural linguistic abilities as well as the use of evaluation to elaborate and enrich narrative. Thirty children with Williams syndrome (5- through 10-years-old) and 30 typically developing age- and gender-matched comparison children were asked to tell a story from a wordless picture book. Results indicated that as a group, children with Williams syndrome committed significantly more morphological errors and used less complex syntax than comparison children, not surprising considering their language delay and impaired cognitive abilities. Significantly, children with Williams syndrome greatly exceeded comparison children in their elaboration and use of evaluative devices and showed particular preference for types of evaluation which serve as social engagement devices, reflecting their profile of excessive sociability. (Williams syndrome, Narrative, Evaluation)

AbstractStudies of young children with unilateral perinatal stroke (PS) have confirmed the plasticity of the developing brain for acquiring language. While recent studies of typically developing children have demonstrated the significant development of language well into adolescence, we know little regarding the course of language development in the PS group as they mature. Will children with PS continue to show the same remarkable plasticity that they exhibited at younger ages? In the present paper we investigate later language and discourse in children with perinatal stroke (ages 7–16) using spoken personal narrative as the discourse context. In contrast to the findings of the discourse studies of younger children with PS, children with left hemisphere lesions made more morphological errors, used less complex syntax and fewer syntactic types than controls; they also produced more impoverished story settings. In contrast, those with right hemisphere lesions performed comparably to controls, except in their impoverished use of complex syntax. The findings provide insight into the nature of later spoken language development in these children, revealing both the nature and extent of neuroplasticity for language as well as potential regional biases.