Acquisition of referentiality in elicited narratives of Estonian-speaking children

Abstract This study addresses the acquisition of referential expressions in pre-schoolers’ narratives Estonian. A total sixteen 6- to 7-year-old typically developing monolingual Estonian children were tested using story “Baby Goat” from Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) (Gagarina, Natalia, Klop, Daleen, Kunnari, Sari, Tantele, Koula, Välimaa, Taina, Balciuniene, Ingrida, Bohnacker, Ute and Walters, Joel. 2012. “MAIN: Narratives.” ZAS Papers Linguistics 56, 1–140, Gagarina, Saru, 2019. assessment instrument – Revised.” 63). The objective was understand how introduce a new referent they maintain referents their storytelling, what correlation could be observed between length average reference chain. Qualitative analyses revealed that generally introduced bare nouns; also used nouns further reference. NPs consisting noun determiner more frequently main characters story, while preferred other characters. influence typological character can use zero references pragmatically driven word order children’s utterances. In general, but not complexity correlated with number units