ABSTRACT
Coherence and cohesion are two essential facets of narrative organization, which both evolve during the course of children’s discourse development. Although much current research has focused on one or the other of these aspects of children’s narrative competence, little is still known about their relation during the course of development. Furthermore, a growing body of results reveals variations in children’s and adults’ narrative performance, which have implications for our understanding of the development of cohesion and coherence. In this chapter, I focus on two types of variations: cross-linguistic variations, showing the impact of language-specific factors on narrative development, and contextual variations, showing that children’s narrative performance partially depends on some dimensions defining narrative situations and tasks.
