We describe two experiments in which children were asked to generate narratives. Each experiment used a different method/tool to motivate or assist children to write narratives. In this paper we analyze the narrative structures generated by children in both these experiments. In the first experiment, fifteen children were given names of three familiar characters, each of whom appears in a different Japanese folktale, and were asked to write a new story in which at least two these three characters appear. In the second experiment, twelve children were asked to generate new stories using a computer-based Story-Making tool that we implemented ourselves. We found that in the first experiment, most stories either contained only one episode, or contained episodes that were connected serially. However, the stories generated in the second experiment displayed a variety of inter-episodic structures: serial, parallel, nested and overlapped. We conclude that the Story-Making tool helps children to generate narratives with more complex structures.
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