ABSTRACT
In this chapter we are concerned with the developing ability to “tell a story.” In Chapter Ia we argued that there is no single “objective” story, because narrators are free to choose perspectives on events. We also suggested that our texts differ considerably according to both the age and 40language of the speaker. Nevertheless, every adult “reader” of Frog, where are you? is certain to extract a plotline which goes from loss of the frog, through searches, to recovery. And every adult narrator is certain to add details of the thwarted attempts along the way, with some commentary on the inner states that motivate and respond to some of the events. Thus, there is a sense of “well-formed” story type as the developmental target, although there is an infinity of potential well-formed versions of the frog story. Here we are concerned with what those versions have in common: linguistic cohesion on the micro-level of individual clauses and adjacent clauses, and thematic coherence on the macro-level of plot organization. 2 It is our finding that — across languages — there is a common developmental pattern towards increasing cohesion and coherence.
