ABSTRACT
Children’s storytelling has most often been studied as a skill, from the perspective of questions about how the characteristics of mature narrative emerge. Accordingly, the bulk of data available about narrative development comes from elicited or prompted stories. McCabe’s foundational work (Peterson & McCabe, 1983), for example, analyzed a collection of stories prompted by the narrator in the course of casual conversation, during which the adult told stories and solicited in response stories about similar topics. Berman and Slobin (1994) analyzed stories that were elicited in response to a wordless narrative picture book, thus even more constrained in topic. These two lines of work have been very productive and enlightening, but do not help us to understand the conditions under which children naturally tell stories.
