ABSTRACT
This chapter considers whether and how the findings from the original crosslinguistic “frog story” study published in Berman and Slobin (1994) generalize across other communicative contexts and elicitation procedures in later school age as well as in early language development. As pointed out by Maya Hickmann in her thoughtful review article, “the entire book is devoted to a particular discourse genre: the production of narratives based on a picture book and addressed to an adult.” (Hickmann 1998:34). In fact, we explicitly note at the outset of our study that a factor “in evaluating our research methodology is the special nature of picture-description tasks in general, and reliance on this storybook and our elicitation procedures in particular …” (Berman & Slobin 1994:24). And we go on to say that
[d]espite the many caveats we note [mainly in Chapters IB and IIA], we feel confident that our findings are robust, because they are consistent with the experience of researchers in diverse cultures,… [and] because we find common developmental patterns across languages, [and also since] our findings are well in line with what has been found by researchers using different procedures for eliciting connected narratives from children …
The present chapter re-evaluates these claims, a decade or so after the original frog-story samples were collected and analyzed, in light of other research on children’s discourse-production abilities in different languages and various contexts. This chapter, like our original study, thus remains focused on production of narrative texts, rather than on processes of comprehension or recall of story content and structure.