The Age of the Narrator and the Qualities of the Narrative Constructed
The Age of the Narrator and the Qualities of the Narrative Constructed

Summary/Abstract: This study was designed to investigate the qualitative features of the stories produced by children, adults and older people with a special focus on sentence structures, the emergence of story units, Mean Length of Utterance (henceforward MLU) and evaluative language. Participants are 60 children from 3 to 5-year-olds, 60 adults from 20 to 30-year-olds and 60 older people who are 60 and over. Data were collected by using Mercer Meyer’s (1969) textless picture book, Frog, where are you?, which depicts the events that take place while a boy and a dog are in search of a missing frog in countryside. Results showed that there are significant differences in the qualitative features of the sentence structure produced by children and other two groups in the usage of connectives. Although adults and the older participants show similar features in the emergence and quality of story units as they are defined by Labov and Waletzky (1967), the narratives produced by children render significant differences both quantitatively and qualitatively. Regarding MLU, as they are in other narrative components, children are different from the other two groups. The mean length of sentences in adults’ stories is longer than those of children and olds and the sentences produced by adults are more complex than those of both olds and children. All of the three groups use evaluative language in their narratives. However, the amount and quality of the evaluative language differs according to the age of the participants.

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