Cohesion and predication in child narrative

This study traces the development of predicate use for genre and cohesion in the narratives of children aged 2 to 5, examining predicate structures and types and their linkages via three types of parallelism and by means of explicit connectives. After age 2, bivalent (transitive) active verbs were dominant; semantically, verbs of the DO and then GO categories dominated until age 5, when BE verbs ranked second. The dominant type of parallelism was reiteration of grammatical structure alone; reiteration of both predicate structure and lexical content decreased with age. Concerning connectives, 2-year-olds used the smallest number – primarily ‘and’ – while 5-year-olds used the greatest variety. However, by age 5, children used parallelism as the second most common connective device after ‘and’.