| This study describes how young Spanish-speaking children become more adept at encoding temporality through grammatical and discourse means in spontaneous intra-conversational narratives. The research involved parallel case studies of two Spanish-speaking children followed longitudinally from ages 2 to 3. Three research questions guided this study: (1) How do Spanish-speaking children use grammar in expressing temporality from two to three years of age? (2) What discourse strategies do Spanish-speaking children use in organizing their narratives from two to three years of age? (3) What developmental relationships among grammatical and discourse skills can be identified in Spanish-speaking children's early narratives?;This study suggests that narratives promote a sophisticated level of grammatical performance. In conversations with familiar adults, children engaged in distant-past talk and provided narratives with clear timelines from early on. Children progressed from scattered unsystematic means to encode temporality to mastering a basic linguistic system that included devices to mark location of events, temporal relations, and aspectual meanings. Unclear timelines became more prevalent as children attempted to narrate more complex content, e.g., simultaneous or multiple crisis-triggering events.;Despite a considerable overlap in temporal forms and meanings, the two children studied displayed contrasting strengths and styles. One child displayed a grammatical strength and was driven by "formal organization". Her narratives tended to display temporal markers as textual organizers and chronological timelines. In contrast, the second child displayed a discourse strength and was driven by "expressive meaning". Her narratives tended to display temporal markers as evaluative devices and timelines with frequent evaluative departures from chronology. Over time contrasts in levels of grammatical and discourse skills became attenuated, so the children reached similar endpoints.;This study highlights the crucial role of studying spontaneous language data to obtain realistic snapshots of children's skills; it also underlines the importance of including protoforms, i.e., protonarratives, to trace the origins of narrative development; and it foregrounds the need to study grammar and discourse in an integrative manner, so that children's progress can be fully understood and differences among children and among research findings can be synthesized into a coherent developmental picture. |
