This study examines the development of children's ability to represent perspective in narrative production. Conceptualizing three distinct aspects of narrative perspective-taking -- the representation of character perspective within the story, the representation of the communicative needs of an audience, and the representation of the narrative text as an autonomous product -- I collected four narrative samples from sixty-six 4- to 7-year olds. Each child retold two fables and dictated two original fictional stories to a scribe. To determine what cognitive factors might contribute to the development of narrative skill, children also completed two language tests (sentence repetition, receptive vocabulary), a working memory measure (backward digit span), and social-reasoning tasks, which included tests of understanding first- and second-order false belief as well as interpretive diversity.;Correlational and regression analyses show social-reasoning ability to make a significant and independent contribution to all three aspects of narrative perspective-taking beyond the effects of age, working memory, and language. These results suggest that storytelling is more than simply a linguistic endeavour, and that children's stories may provide a window on their developing understanding of mind. The study concludes with a discussion of the developmental relationships among narrative, language, and theory of mind.;The findings show significant development with age in all three areas of narrative perspective-taking, as the bulk of children's stories shifted from the depiction of simple action sequences at the age of 4 to multilayered tales integrating both character and audience perspective into complex plots by 6 or 7 years. Further, individual differences within age groups were as pronounced as developmental ones; a child's ability or inclination to represent perspective showed marked consistency across the four narrative samples. The three aspects of narrative perspective were highly intercorrelated; controlling for age, both the ability to accommodate an audience and children's text awareness were significantly related to the tendency to portray the inner worlds of story characters.
展开▼
