| The achievement of narrative competence is a key communicative challenge facing children following the mastery of basic symbolic representation and reference. Narratives convey an ordered sequence of goal-directed actions on the part of sentient agents. They are exquisitely sensitive to the unexpected and are enacted on two levels simultaneously, namely a plane of action and a plane of consciousness. Narrative skills develop across the entirety of childhood, but particularly in the preschool years, there are remarkable changes in children's narrative competence. Before 4-years-old, children's narratives typically lack the key features expected in the stories of more mature narrators. The research methods and findings from previous investigations of narrative development in young children are reviewed. Special emphasis is given to social-interactionist theoretical frameworks and to picture book-reading as a social context in which significant developmental processes occur. The role of joint mother-child book reading in infants' entry into language is described, touching upon the establishment of, and later changes in, the organization of important readingrelated routines. Finally, the usefulness of joint parent-child picture-book exploration as a context for the development of increasingly complex skills like narrative is considered. The findings and limitations of a recent study taking this approach are reviewed.; The current study examines the interactions of 24-, 30-, and 36-month-old children and their mothers exploring picture-book narratives over a two-week period. Each mother-child dyad was observed three times at one week intervals.; A novel coding scheme was used to characterize recurrent discussions of two initially unfamiliar picture-books. It describes which narrative elements are focused on and what communicative roles mothers and children take. We found that discussion content depends on child age, but changes little with increasing story-familiarity. In contrast, discussion organization depends primarily on story familiarity and varies only slightly with child age. Between 24- and 30-months, there is increased focus on narrative intangibles like story characters' feelings and explanations for their actions. In terms of organization, mothers increase the complexity of their questions over sessions. Children ask more questions in the first than the last session. Overall, 17% of children's questions target the plane of consciousness. |
