Development of causal coherence in the narrative discourse of monolingual Persian-speaking children

The ability to produce coherent discourse as an important component of child developmental knowledge during language acquisition is an essential part of language knowledge which child should acquire. The aims of the present research, are to investigate the ability of monolingual Persian-speaking children in maintaining narrative cohesion and also to compare its findings with other studies in order to acknowledge previous findings based on analysis of causal network. To this aim, thirty 5-6 year old children (mean age= 5 years and 6 months), thirty 9-10 year old children (mean age= 9 years and 6 months) and thirty 20-25 male adults (mean age=23 years and 8 months) participated in the study. These groups were encouraged to narrate two picture story books namely "Frog, Where are you?" and "Frog". Their stories were analyzed based on the causal network. The findings of the study showed a developmental progress in achieving narrative cohesion by means of establishing causal relations between narrative events. The results of the study indicated that compared with causal connectives, the causal network appears to be a more sensitive tool to reveal children’s development in maintaining cohesion.