Variations in the realization of the Preferred Argument Structure in children and adults from two elicitation tasks

Abstract

In this paper we present the results from an analysis of narratives by adults and children in terms of their Preferred Argument Structure (PAS; Du Bois, 1987). The corpus was built from two elicitation tasks: telling a story from pictures and narrating a personal experience. Our results show that PAS trends in children and adults are similar, but with significant differences between the two elicitation tasks. A second analysis of the data shows a relative preference for using a noun phrase to refer to continuous topics in the storytelling. This suggests that, for this particular task, speakers (and particularly children) combine narrative strategies with strategies used for describing independent images.