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A developmental study of expressing simultaneous events in film-based narratives

This study examines the expression of simultaneity in the film-based oral narratives of 100 English monolinguals in the following three age groups: preschoolers (4–6 years), school-aged children (7–10 years), and adults (19–48 years). Participants told a story of what happened in the film, in an off-line task, to an interviewer who had not seen the film. The film was rich in simultaneous events at various sites through the episodic structure. Focus was on quantitative and qualitative aspects of simultaneity, from the perspective of forms and functions. Quantitative results showed very little simultaneity at preschool and almost similar expression at school age and adulthood. Qualitative analyses revealed that perceptual, semantic, and discourse factors affected the profiles of development. Preschool children expressed local simultaneity between situations in adjacent clauses, more frequently between unbounded situations that are implicitly simultaneous. Besides, they tended to express more simultaneity in scenes that were perceived in a single screen shot. From age 7, children became more able to express simultaneity across larger stretches of the text, covering a wider scope on situations on parallel timelines. Top-down knowledge of narrative organization guided older narrators to take temporal perspectives that go beyond the semantic properties of events, giving way to discourse-motivated simultaneity where causality plays a substantial role. Language forms to express simultaneity showed a long developmental route – through verb semantic and tense-aspect alternations as the widest, basic usage to specific lexical forms like conjunctions (e.g. while), adverbs (e.g. meanwhile), and more sophisticated syntactic configurations. The form-function analyses enabled an exploration of the cognitive and language abilities in the production of simultaneous relations under the constraints of narrative discourse organization. The study reinforced the results of previous developmental studies of temporality, shedding further light on the relatively unexplored topic of simultaneity expression.