Investigation of Cohesion in the Oral Narratives of Normal Monolingual Persian-Speaking children

In the present study, monolingual Persian-speaking children's mastery of conjunctives and pronominalization as two cohesive devices are investigated within the theoretical framework of cohesion by Halliday and Hassan (1976). To this aim, 80 children in four age groups of 3, 5, 7, 9 were selected from 2 kindergartens and 4 elementary schools in Tehran and were compared with a group of 20 adults as a control group. To investigate the performance of children in the use of these cohesive devices, two narrative production tests in the form of picture story books were administered. The findings of the present study indicated showed that three year old children used a nominal strategy and used temporal conjunctions to create cohesion in stories. Five year old children used a large amount of temporal conjunctions. Their stories were organized properly with the use of thematic-subject strategy. From seven years old onwards, children's narratives became more complex and the variety of connectives increases significantly. Children make use of differential linguistic markers (full anaphoric strategy) to structure their narratives as linguistic whole. They use pronouns to maintain referent and at the same time, they tried to provide clear and unambiguous reference to characters in the story by using nominal form to switch referents.