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Understanding the landscapes of stories: The association between

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Understanding the landscapes of stories: the association between

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Stephanie M. Curentona
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Bloustein School of Planning & Public Policy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA
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Early Child Development and Care
2010, 1–18, iFirst Article
Understanding the landscapes of stories: the association between

preschoolers’ narrative comprehension and production skills and
cognitive abilities
Stephanie M. Curenton*
Bloustein School of Planning & Public Policy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA
(Received 19 February 2010; final version received 2 May 2010)
Taylor and Francis
GECD_A_490946.sgm
Early
10.1080/03004430.2010.490946
0300-4430
Original
Taylor
02010
00
Dr
curenton@rutgers.edu
000002010
StephanieCurenton
Childhood
&Article
Francis
(print)/1476-8275
Development(online)
and Care
Seventy-two African-American and European American low-income preschoolers

Downloaded By: [Curenton, Stephanie M.] At: 14:13 11 August 2010
attending Head Start and community childcare centres were asked to create an oral
story using a wordless picture book, then told an oral story using the same book
and asked follow-up comprehension questions. Children’s performance was better
on questions addressing the character’s actions versus his motives/intentions. Five-
year-olds outperformed three-year-olds, and African-Americans outperformed
European Americans on questions about the character’s motives/intentions. After
controlling for children’s age and ethnicity, the only narrative skill that predicted
cognitive abilities was narrative quality: children who created narratives that
included the character’s motives/intentions had higher cognitive skills.
Keywords: narratives; oral storytelling; false belief; Head Start; cognition
Introduction
The creation and comprehension of narratives involves the synchrony of several skills
and knowledge bases, such as receptive language skills, meta-representational skills,
perspective-taking skills, as well as the general knowledge of story structure (see Paris
& Paris, 2003). In order to be a good story-teller and story-listener children must be
capable of simultaneously understanding not only what has happened in the story but
also why it has happened (Astington, Britton, & Pellegrini, 1990; Bruner, 1986).
Bruner’s (1986) description of two story landscapes provides a framework for how
these skills can be synchronised. According to Bruner’s (1986) theory, the action
landscape describes what has happened; the consciousness landscape offers explana-
tion, justification or speculation as to why something happened. The action landscape
only includes information about the events of the story, but the consciousness land-
scape includes information not only about events but also the interpretation of the
protagonist’s thoughts, motives, internal states and social perspective. It is this
psychological perspective that sheds light into the consciousness of the character.
Theoretically, grasping the consciousness landscape is more difficult than the action
landscape because it asks children to engage in social cognitive reasoning in which
they must predict and/or explain the protagonist’s behaviour.
In essence, Bruner’s theory highlights the importance of social cognitive reasoning
in storytelling. A story without information regarding the character’s psychological
*Email: curenton@rutgers.edu
ISSN 0300-4430 print/ISSN 1476-8275 online

© 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/03004430.2010.490946
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2 S.M. Curenton
perspective is merely a chain of events rather than a true story. It is what Curenton and
Lucas (2007) refer to as an ‘intermediate’ story pyramid, which is one in which a child
has created a story that is grammatically coherent and describes a series of temporarily
linked events, yet the story has no mention of the character’s internal psychological
states. Such a story is similar to the less complex narrative assessment levels described
by Applebee (1978), Stein and Glenn (1979) and McCabe (1997). Hence, narratives
without psychological causality would be judged by a variety of narrative researchers
to be less sophisticated than narratives that included such information. Furthermore,
based on what we know from the theory of mind literature, the ability to comprehend
this psychological information indicates advancement in overall social cognitive
skills.
The present study advances our empirical knowledge of children’s narrative skills
because it applies Bruner’s theoretical framework to aspects of narrative production
and comprehension. In my prior work (Curenton, 2004), I have used this theoretical
framework to examine preschoolers’ narrative production and their social cognition.
In the present study, I attempt to build on the empirical evidence for Bruner’s theory
by: (1) examining story landscapes in the context of narrative production and compre-
hension, and (2) examining how these aspects of production and comprehension are
associated with children’s language-based cognitive skills.
Narrative production
There has been considerable research on how children’s narrative production is
related to their social cognitive reasoning. When preschoolers are prompted by mate-
rials that provide a story structure, they can create stories that are rich in plot, themes
and internal states (Benson, 1993, 1997; Shapiro & Hudson, 1991). Bamberg and
Damrad-Frye (1991) found that middle-class, five-year-olds use mental state refer-
ences in their narratives, and Benson (1997) has found similar results with low-income
kindergartners. Studies examining how narrative production relates to children’s
social cognitive reasoning have shown that for some at-risk populations there is an
association between children’s narrative complexity and their ability to pass theory of
mind tasks (Curenton, 2004; Tager-Flusberg, Adamson, & Romski, 1997). In addition,
two studies have found an association between children’s use of internal state language
in their narratives and their ability to pass false belief tasks (Moore & Furrow, 1990;
Tager-Flusberg & Sullivan, 1995). Such studies indicate that some children are actu-
ally able to incorporate the features of the consciousness landscape into their stories.
In fact, one study found an age-related trend in children’s ability to do this: five-year-
old children produced more narratives that incorporated the consciousness landscape,
whereas four-year-old children created more stories at the action landscape (Curenton,
2004). Younger preschoolers may find the consciousness landscape challenging to
articulate because they have difficulty explaining a character’s emotional responses,
desires and thoughts (John, Lui, & Tannock, 2003).
Narrative comprehension
There has also been research on children’s narrative comprehension and its relationship
to social cognitive reasoning. Some researchers found no differences between asking
children social cognitive questions in a narrative format or in a puppet format (Olver
& Ratner, 1994), but others have found that embedding social cognitive questions in
Early Child Development and Care 3
narrative tasks were harder for children to answer (Chen & Lin, 1994). Yet still others
have found theory of mind tasks embedded in narratives are easier for children to under-
stand than tasks which used a doll/puppet format (Lewis, Freeman, Hagestadt, &
Douglas, 1994). There is research indicating that preschoolers are able to identify with
the protagonist’s perspective during a story (Rall & Harris, 2000). Given these conflict-
ing results more research investigating whether children can answer questions about
the characters’ thoughts and internal states are needed.
Narratives and cognition

Children’s understanding of narratives is important for their language and cognitive
skills because narratives provide a conceptual framework for organising written and
oral information (Paris & Paris, 2003; Peterson, Jesso, & McCabe, 1999; Whitehurst
& Lonigan, 1998). Varnhagen, Morrison, and Everall (1994) found that children’s
ability to remember a story increased from kindergarten to first grade, and researchers
speculate that is related to general increases in children’s memory that develop from
preschool to age seven. Several researchers have found that narrative ability is related
to preschoolers’ general cognitive skills as well as their language and emergent liter-
acy skills. For instance, Snow, Tabors, Nicholson, and Kurkland (1995) found that
young children’s ability to comprehend and produce a fictional narrative correlates
with their performance on language and emergent literacy measures. Paris and Paris
(2003) explain that ‘children’s narrative thinking is a fundamental contributor to early
reading comprehension and that assessments of narrative thinking with pictures can
identify children’s comprehension strengths and difficulties’ (p. 41). In addition, other
work has found that preschoolers’ understanding of oral stories based on pictures has
been found to be related to their ability to describe the story setting, name a moral and
remember story characters (Isbell, Sobol, Lindauer, & Lowrance, 2004). Further
research that explores how the narrative and production and comprehension skills are
related to children’s cognitive skills is needed.
Present study
This study examined children’s ability to use social cognitive reasoning to produce
and comprehend oral narratives using a wordless picture book. There were three
objectives posed for this study. First, children’s narrative production was examined;
children were asked to produce an oral story. The goal was to determine if there were
age-related changes in children’s ability to produce a grammatically complex narra-
tive and make references to the protagonist’s beliefs, emotions, motives and intentions
(i.e. whether children created stories that addressed the consciousness landscape). It
was hypothesised that older children would produce more complex narratives accord-
ing to every measure.
For the second objective, children’s narrative comprehension was investigated by
asking them follow-up comprehension questions after hearing a story based on the
same book. In terms of narrative comprehension, the goal was to assess if children
would demonstrate age-related changes in their ability to comprehend questions about
the landscape of consciousness, which requires children to understand a character’s
motives and intentions. It was hypothesised that older children would comprehend the
character’s motives/intentions better than younger children would.
4 S.M. Curenton
The third, and final objective, was to assess whether children’s narrative skills
were related to their cognitive skills, even after controlling for demographic factors,
such as age and ethnicity. It was hypothesised that all aspects of narrative skills, both
comprehension and production, would be associated with children’s language-based
cognitive skills.
Method
Participants
Seventy-two children (36 African-American, 36 European American) from Head Start
and other preschools serving low-income children participated in the study. There
were approximately equal numbers of African-American and European American
children in both types of preschools. Children were evenly divided into age groups:
three-year-olds (M = 3 years 7 months, n = 24), four-year olds (M = 4 years 5 months,
n = 24) and five-year-olds (M = 6 years 3 months, n = 24). There were equal numbers
of African-American and European American children in each age group, and there
were 40 girls and 32 boys in the sample.
All children who participated in the study lived in families that met the national
standards for poverty as evidenced by their enrolment in Head Start, or they lived in
families which received government childcare subsidies from Temporary Aid for
Needy Families or the Child Care Development Fund, which enabled the parents to
send their child to any local preschool at a tuition rate based on their income. Parental
permission forms were given to all Head Start parents, but parents with children
enrolled in non-Head Start centres were only given permission forms if their family
received childcare subsidies. These permission forms asked for demographic informa-
tion (i.e. birthday and race/ethnicity) about the children.
Children were only selected to participate in the study if their parent described
them as African-American/Black or European American/White and if the parent’s
ethnicity matched the child’s. This matching was done in order to serve as a proxy for
the family socio-cultural narrative practices to which children may have been
exposed; for example, African-American children who are socialised by European
American parents are primarily exposed to European American traditions and vice
versa.
Materials
Picture books are thought to be suitable for testing oral story skills if they convey lots
of action, repetition, and have visual appeal; in fact, picture books may be an ideal
method for testing narrative comprehension for children at various literacy levels and
from diverse home and cultural literacy experiences (Trostle & Hicks, 1998) and for
testing narrative production because picture prompts help children with poor narrative
skills tell better stories (Cain & Oakhill, 1996).
Children were shown the wordless picture book, Frog, Where Are You?, by Mercer
Mayer (1994), a children’s illustrator who publishes a series of books about a boy and
his pets and family. This book was chosen for the study because it has been used
frequently in research to elicit children’s fictional narratives, examining children’s

understanding of motives and goal-based behaviour (see Bamberg, 1997; Benson,
1997; Curenton, 2004).
First, children were asked to view all of the pages in order to become familiar with
the picture sequence because research has shown that children tell more coherent
stories when they are permitted to view the stimuli beforehand (Shapiro & Hudson,
1991). After children had seen all the pictures, the experimenter asked them to make
up a story using the pictures in the book. If children were hesitant, the experimenter
probed them with standard probes, viz. ‘Tell me about this page?’ or ‘What about this
page?’
A trained research assistant transcribed the narratives using the tools in
the CHILDES language project (MacWhinney, 2000) – CHAT (Codes for Human
Analysis Transcripts) and CLAN (Child Language Analysis Program). Transcripts
were first entered into the CHAT system which is the portal for transcription, and
then they were analysed using language programs from CLAN. CHILDES is a
language analysis program and database exchange that has been widely used in the
developmental psychology literature since 1984 (see MacWhinney, 2000). After the
transcripts were transcribed verbatim into CHAT, a second research assistant then
reviewed each transcript while listening to the audiotaped narrative, at which point
corrections were made to the transcript when discrepancies were observed. Next, all
experimenter utterances and child utterances that were irrelevant to the story or that
would confound the accurate scoring of narratives (e.g. retraces, fillers) were
deleted. Deletion guidelines for these transcripts are specifically described in
Curenton and Justice (2004), and general guidelines about deleting irrelevant mate-
rial from transcripts are described in Curenton and Lucas (2007). The final tran-
script consisted of only children’s coherent, spontaneous remarks that were relevant
to the story.
Inter-rater reliability was conducted independently by two trained coders. Item-
by-item comparisons were made to determine scoring agreement. An inter-rater
agreement score was obtained by dividing the total number of agreements by the total
number of item comparisons and multiplying by 100. For deletion procedures, 10%
of transcripts were scored (n = 7) and reliability was 98%, ranging from 94% to
100%. Any disagreements were resolved through discussion.
Syntactic features of narratives

Children’s remaining utterances were divided into syntactic clauses called C-units
(Loban, 1976). A C-unit is defined as an independent clause (i.e. a subject–verb prop-
osition) and all of its modifiers. C-units are parsed as coordinating conjunctions (e.g.
and, or, but, so) and conjunctive adverbs (e.g. then) if they were preceded and
followed by subject–verb propositions. However, subordinate clauses (e.g. clauses
that begin with subordinating conjunctions like because, if or when) are not counted
as separate C-units because subordinate clauses modify independent clauses. Special
considerations are made regarding the inclusion of dialogue in a narrative; fragments
that are part of dialogue are not deleted in order to preserve the integrity of the
dialogue. Detailed guidelines about segmentation rules for C-units are described in
Curenton and Lucas (2007), and findings detailing the use of C-units with low-income
and minority populations are described in several studies (see Craig, Washington, &
Thompson-Porter, 1998; Curenton, 2004; Curenton & Justice, 2004).
6 S.M. Curenton
C-units were specifically designed for narrative analyses, and they accurately
measure the complexity of longer utterances produced by older children. Although
research has demonstrated that the traditional measure of syntactic complexity, mean
length of utterance (MLU), is a useful predictor of children’s age and linguistic
complexity during the early stages of language development (Miller & Chapman,
1981), other investigators have found that MLU is less associated with linguistic
complexity once children reach four years of age (Scarborough, Wyckoff, & Davidson,
1986). Like the more traditional MLU, there is a significant correlation between average
C-unit length and age (Craig et al., 1998). However, C-units are superior to the MLU
because the average length of a C-unit can be used to measure syntactic complexity in
longer utterances, whereas the relationship between syntax and MLU weakens once
children’s utterances exceed three words (Scarborough, Rescorla, Tager-Flusberg,
Fowler, & Sudhalter, 1991).
The final transcripts were analysed by CLAN (MacWhinney, 2000) to calculate
the mean length of C-unit (MLCU) and number of C-units. The MLCU is the average
number of words per C-unit, indicating the linguistic density of children’s clauses.
The number of C-units is the total number of clauses (viz., subject–verb propositions)
produced by the child. Again, inter-rater reliability was conducted independently by
two trained coders using item-by-item comparisons. An inter-rater agreement score
was obtained by dividing the total number of agreements by the total number of item
comparisons and multiplying by 100. For the C-unit segmentation procedures, 11% of
transcripts were scored (n = 8); reliability was 99%, ranging from 96% to 100%. Any
disagreements were resolved through discussion.
Narrative quality
Numerous researchers have descriptions of narrative quality, but in general most agree
that children’s stories move from brief, non-causally linked descriptions, which are
characteristic of young children, to longer, evaluative, causally linked stories, which
are characteristic of older children (Applebee, 1978; Curenton & Lucas, 2007;
McCabe, 1997; Stein & Glenn, 1979). Bruner (1986) described a good narrative as
one embodying both an action and consciousness landscape. Narratives were rated as
illogical (illogical stories with irrelevant descriptions), action-based (stories with
clear descriptions of the pictures and the character’s action but no mention of plot or
internal states) or consciousness-based (stories with clear descriptions of the pictures
and interpretations of the plot and the character’s internal states). The consciousness-
based rating was the highest in quality because children who created this type of story
were incorporating social cognitive reasoning. Appendix 1 describes the rating system
for narrative quality and examples.
Two trained undergraduate European American raters who were blind to chil-
dren’s demographic characteristics, narrative syntactic features and social cognitive
skills individually rated the transcripts. Raters were trained by the first author, an
African-American, who had also created the coding scheme. Inter-rater reliability was
established by double-coding 31 transcripts, and the reliability was 91%. Any
disagreements were conferenced.
Because some research has indicated non-African-American observers rate the
behaviour of mother–daughter dyads more negatively than African-American observ-
ers do (Gonzales, Cauce, & Mason, 1996), preliminary results were conducted to exam-
ine whether the raters in the present study may have been biased. Such preliminary
results failed to reveal any significant differences between African-American

(M = 1.11, n = 36) and White (M = 1.28, n = 36) children in terms of average ratings
of narrative quality, t(70) = −.91, p = n.s., indicating there was no systematic bias
among the raters. These results are aligned with experimental research examining chil-
dren’s conversations with Black and White experimenters indicating children’s
language production was the same regardless of experimenter’s race (Bountress, Boun-
tress, & Tonelson, 1988).
After the children produced their story, the experimenter told them a story using the
same book. The story included information about the protagonist’s actions, desires
and emotions, but no information was provided about his beliefs because the goal was
to mimic narrative false belief studies in which children were required to impute
beliefs based on other contextual and psychological information (Chen & Lin, 1994;
Lewis et al., 1994; Olver & Ratner, 1994). The story script is detailed in Appendix 2.
At the end of the story, the experimenter turned back to the corresponding page
and asked questions assessing children’s memory of what had happened in the story
(the action landscape) and their knowledge of the character’s belief (the consciousness
landscape). These questions are illustrated in Table 1. The order of the answer choices
was balanced between and within children. The answer choice order was alternated
throughout the task. Half the children received the answer choices ‘frog or mole’
(correct answer first), ‘owl or frog’ (incorrect answer first) and ‘tree branches or
antlers’ (correct answer first); the other half heard the answer choices ‘mole or frog’
(incorrect answer first), ‘frog or owl’ (correct answer first) and ‘antlers or tree
branches’ (incorrect answer first). Children were given 1 point if they answered the
action question correctly. However, for the consciousness questions, they only
received a point if they had answered the corresponding action question correctly. The
criterion for the consciousness questions was made contingent on passing the action
question to ensure that children correctly remembered what had happened in the story.
Such a scoring procedure is in line with Bruner’s (1986) theory because he explains
that one cannot truly understand internal workings of a character’s mind without
remembering his/her actions. In addition, such scoring criteria are empirically consis-
tent with narrative false belief studies (Chen & Lin, 1994; Lewis et al., 1994; Olver &
Ratner, 1994).
Table 1. Narrative comprehension questions.

Page Question type Description
10 Consciousness When Robert first looked in the hole, who did he think might
be there, his frog or a mole?
Action Who was really there, his frog or a mole?
12–13 Consciousness When Robert first looked inside the hollow, who did he think
might be there, an owl or his frog?
Action Who was really there, an owl or his frog?
17 Consciousness When Robert was leaning on the long, skinny black things,
what did he think they were, tree branches or antlers?
Action What were they really and truly, tree branches or antlers?
8 S.M. Curenton
Cognitive skills
The language and cognition subscale of the Early Screening Inventory-Revised (ESI;
Meisels, Marsden, Wiske Stone, & Henderson, 1997) was administered to all chil-
dren by one of the three female experimenters. The subscale included activities, such
as counting blocks, describing objects, analytical verbal reasoning and auditory
sequencing. This instrument was chosen because its norming population over-
sampled low-income children: the majority of the sample had parents who worked
blue-collar or service-oriented jobs and 32% of the sample were Head Start children
(Meisels et al., 1997). Reliability for the ESI-P was .98 and .87 for the ESI-K
(Meisels et al., 1997).
This screening inventory has equivalent, but age-appropriate items, for two age
groups of preschoolers: the preschool version (ESI-P) designed for 3- to 4.5-year-
olds or the kindergarten version (ESI-K) for 4.5- to 6-year-olds. Because both
versions of the inventory contain equivalent, if not the same items, scores on the two
versions are comparable. Scores on the language and cognition subscale were
summed in order to provide an overall score for language/cognitive skills. A higher

score indicated children answered more questions correctly, and a lower score indi-
cated that children answered fewer questions correctly (range 1–12). Preliminary
results demonstrated no significant differences between African (M = 7.44, n = 36)
and European (M = 8.36, n = 36) Americans in terms of total scores on the ESI, t(70)
= −.92, p = n.s.
Results
Preliminary results indicated no gender effects; therefore, gender was not included in
any of the analyses. Table 2 illustrates the correlation among the variables.
A race × age multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was conducted to exam-
ine children’s narrative production skills – MLCU, C-units and quality. There was no
multivariate race effect, but there was a significant multivariate age effect. Older
children had better narrative skills than younger children, Wilk’s λ = .63, F(6,122) =
5.36, p < .001, η2 = .21. This multivariate effect was followed up by a series of anal-
yses of variance (ANOVAs). Results from these ANOVAs revealed older children’s
Table 2. Correlations.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
1. Child’s age –
2. Action questions .32** –
3. Consciousness questions .14 .29** –
4. Narrative quality .52*** .41*** .08 –
5. MLCU .36*** .26* .12 .59*** –
6. Number of C-units .34*** .25* .01 .56*** .42*** –
7. Cognitive/language .53*** .38*** .07 .66*** .38*** .43*** –
*p < .05; **p < .01; ***p ≤ .001.
Note: MLCU, mean length of utterance.
Table 3. Mean (and standard deviation) for narrative production skills by age group.
Age Mean length of C-unit Number of C-units Narrative quality
3-year-olds 4.79(1.20)A 18.27 (10.89)A .59 (.69)A
4-year-olds 5.82 (1.30)B 24.13 (10.19) 1.58 (.51)B
5-year-olds 6.07 (1.12)B 26.75 (10.07)B 1.67 (.65)B
Note: A < B at p < .001.
narratives contained longer MLCUs (F[2,68] = 6.73, p < .05, η2 = .17), more C-units
(F[2,68] = 4.12, p < .05, η2 = .12) and were higher in quality (F[2,68] = 18.07,
p < .001, η2 = .37). Table 3 displays the means for each narrative skill by age group.
A repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted with question (action vs. conscious-
ness) as the within-subjects variable and age (3, 4, vs. 5) and ethnicity (African vs.
European American) as between-subject variables. Results revealed a significant
question effect, F(1,66) = 100.81, p < .001, η2 = .61. Children’s performance on the
action questions (M = 2.08, SD = .99) exceeded their performance on the conscious-
ness questions (M = .72, SD = 1.0). In addition, there was a significant age and
question effect. Tukey’s post-hoc comparisons revealed five-year-olds (M = 3.38,
SD = 1.69) outperformed three-year-olds (M = 2.29, SD = 1.73) on narrative compre-
hension, but the four-year-olds (M = 2.75, SD = 1.19) were not different from either
group, F(2,66) = 3.17, p < .05, η2 = .09.
There was also a significant ethnicity main effect, F(1,66) = 4.19, p < .05, η2
= .06, results revealed that African-Americans (M = 3.17, SD = 1.59) outperformed
European Americans (M = 2.44, SD = 1.54). Additional post-hoc analyses indicate
that the ethnicity effect was largely due to differences between African and
European Americans in terms of the consciousness question. On average, African-
American children (M = 1.0, SD = 1.04) had higher scores than European
Americans (M = .44, SD = 1.0) for this question. Given that performance declined
so drastically for all children on the consciousness questions, chi-square analyses
were conducted in order to rule out chance performance. Table 4 reveals that there
were significant differences between African-American children across all answer
categories, χ2 (3) = 13.37, p < .01.
Narratives and cognitive skills

Table 5 demonstrates the results from a multivariate regression, controlling for chil-
dren’s age and ethnic differences.1 Results indicate that after controlling for ethnicity
and age, the only narrative skill that significantly predicted children’s performance on
Table 4. Proportion (and number) of children with consciousness scores by ethnicity.

Consciousness score 0 1 2 3
African-Americans .42 (15) .03 (10) .19 (7) .11 (4)
(n = 36)
European Americans .72 (26) .19 (7) .00 (0) .08 (3)
(n = 36)
10 S.M. Curenton
Table 5. Hierarchical regression analysis for variables predicting cognitive/language scores.

B (SE) F Unique R2
Step 1 15.16 .32
Age .16 (.03)***
Ethnicity .96 (.54)
Step 2 9.31 .20
Action questions .31 (.27)
Consciousness questions .02 (.26)
Narrative quality 1.28 (.37)***
Mean length C-unit −.10 (.30)
Number of C-units .11 (.30)
***p ≤ .001.
the cognitive and language battery was their ability to produce narratives addressing
the story landscapes (B = 1.28, p ≤ .001). As shown in Figure 1, on average, the chil-
dren who produced consciousness landscape stories had higher cognitive skills than
those who produced only action landscapes and those who produced illogical stories.
Among the sample, there were 30 children who produced consciousness-based stories
(M = 9.7, SD = 1.68), 26 who produced action-based stories (M = 7.46, SD = 2.52)
and only 16 who produced illogical stories (M = 5.06, SD = 1.98).
Figure 1. Mean cognitive/language score by narrative quality.
Figure 1. Mean cognitive/language score by narrative quality.

Discussion
This study examined low-income children’s narrative production and comprehension
and the relationship of these skills to children’s cognitive abilities. As expected, there
were developmental changes in children’s narrative production as well as their
comprehension. In terms of narrative production, as expected, five-year-olds told
stories that were grammatically more complex (e.g. having longer MLCUs) and more
coherent (e.g. having more subject–verb propositions), and this demonstrates older
children are successful at creating these ‘basic’ story pyramids (see Curenton &
Lucas, 2007). Similarly, five-year-olds were more successful at creating what Curen-
ton and Lucas (2007) refer to as ‘complex’ pyramids, meaning they told stories that
included talk about the character’s intentions and motivations as well as what had
happened in the story. Such age-related trends in children’s narrative production have
been seen in numerous other studies (e.g. Craig et al., 1998; Curenton & Justice, 2004;
Shapiro & Hudson, 1991); therefore, they provide further confirmatory evidence.
The findings from this study contributing new evidence were those related to
narrative comprehension. As with production, similar age trends were evident in terms
of preschoolers’ comprehension. Overall, five-year-old children understood the story
better than three-year-olds, as evidenced by their higher scores on all the questions and
their higher scores on the questions about the character’s consciousness specifically.
Nevertheless, all children were better at understanding the story plot than at inferring
what the character was thinking as evidenced by the fact that they answered more
action questions correctly than consciousness questions. These age-related effects
may be due to advances in memory skills (Varnhagen et al., 1994) as well as social
cognitive advances in children’s development (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001).
These findings contribute to our body of knowledge about narrative and social cogni-
tive skills because they are the first to demonstrate that Bruner’s theory can be trans-
lated into a quantifiable assessment and that children’s performance on such
assessment is related to their development. Nevertheless, despite the developmental
advances, there was still a main effect for question type, indicating methodology also
played a key role in how children performed on narrative comprehension.
Overall, children were more successful at answering the action questions correctly.
There are several reasons why children’s performance may have declined on the
consciousness questions. One cognitive processing feature that may have made the
consciousness questions more difficult is that they required the child to process
the emotionally and socially dense nature of the story, whereas understanding the
action questions simply required that the child remember what happened in the story.
In the introduction of the story children were made aware of the complex social and
emotional relationship between characters:
Once upon a time there was a boy named Robert. Robert had a dog and a frog, and he
loved them both very much. One night while Robert was asleep his frog snuck out of the
jar and ran away. The next morning when Robert woke up, he was surprised to find that
his frog had run away. Robert was sad.
Another reason why the consciousness questions may have been more difficult is
they required the child to use perspective-taking and meta-representational skills,
meaning they required a more sophisticated form of cognitive processing. In order to
answer these questions correctly, the child had to take the character’s perspective (i.e.
engage in perspective-taking) and then infer what the character was thinking (i.e.
12 S.M. Curenton
engage in meta-representational skills). According to the theory of mind literature,

children are not able to reliably engage in this form of reasoning until they are about
4.5 years old (Wellman et al., 2001), and other researchers have found that low-
income children may not grasp this skill until even later (Curenton, 2003; Holmes,
Black, & Miller, 1996).
Finally, a third reason why these questions may have been more difficult is
because the protagonist in the story was searching for an animate entity (viz. his pet
frog). Prior work (Nguyen & Frye, 1999; Symons, McLaughlin, Moore, & Morine,
1997) has reported that five-year-olds had more difficulty with false belief questions
concerning an animate/intentional object being referent rather than an inanimate
object. Symons et al. (1997) discovered that the intention of the referent impacted
children’s performance. This finding even applied to animals that were personified in
the scenarios and described as having intentional motivates for relocating. In the
excerpt from the story, which was described previously, it is clear that the frog
intended to run away because the experimenter’s story says, ‘his frog snuck out of the
jar and ran away’. Thus, the frog was personified as having intentions and desires.
Children had to reflect on Robert’s motives and intentions as he was reflecting on the
frog’s motives and intentions, requiring second-order meta-mentalising (‘I think he
thinks the frog thinks’). It is not until children are in middle childhood, around age 7,
that they are able to engage in second-order social cognitive reasoning about internal
states (Charman & Shmueli-Goetz, 1998).
Aside from these methodological considerations for children’s comprehension
performance, there was also an interesting socio-cultural effect showing African-
American children were better than European Americans on the story comprehension
questions. Post-hoc analyses revealed that this was because the African-American
children had higher scores on the consciousness questions specifically. Based on
African-American children’s performance on the consciousness questions, it appears
as if they were better at inferring the character’s motives and internal states.
The difference between the ethnic groups’ scores could be due to socio-cultural
factors, such as the amount of storytelling in their homes and communities. Although
storytelling is reportedly practised in both African-American (Heath, 1982) and
European American (Miller, Fung, & Mintz, 1996) lower income communities, there
may still be qualitative and quantitative differences regarding the narrative practices
of these ethnic groups. This task may have been more akin to what African-American
children actually experience when they are reasoning about someone’s internal states.
For African-Americans, the self is typically talked about in relation to others, and this
talk about others occurs within a complex situational context (see Sperry & Sperry,
1995). This finding should be investigated further because narrative comprehension
may be a cognitive strength for African-American children. Although other ethno-
graphic literature describes the nature and frequency of oral storytelling within Afri-
can-American (Heath, 1982; Sperry & Sperry, 1995) and low-income communities
(Miller et al., 1996), in the present study no information regarding oral storytelling
practices was collected. Ideally, it would have been useful to gather information
about the frequency and complexity of the families’ narrative traditions, and future
research should include this information as well as self-reports of cultural language
practices.
Lastly, this work demonstrates that narrative and cognitive skills are linked.
Results from this study take the field’s empirical knowledge a step further by demon-
strating that, after controlling for children’s age and ethnicity, children’s ability to
produce narratives that include descriptions of the story plot as well as the character’s
intentions and motives was predictive of their language-based cognitive skills.
Contrary to the hypotheses, narrative features, such as MLCU and number of prop-
ositions, were not related to cognitive skills once age and ethnicity were controlled
for. This finding is probably due to the strong age-related progression associated with
these skills. The null results for MLCU and number of propositions in this study raise
the question of whether assessing the social cognitive aspect of preschoolers’ narra-
tives may be a better predictor of cognition than those aspects of narratives that are
highly tied to grammar. The aspects of narratives typically tied to grammar are
referred to as microstructure features (see Justice et al., 2006) and include measures
like MLCU, number of C-units (or T-units), conjunctions, number of different words,
etc. Justice et al. (2006) demonstrated microstructure features were strongly associ-
ated with age-related development and language abilities. There is little work demon-
strating how these microstructure features are related to children’s general cognition,
especially after controlling for age effects.
The present results raise the question of how macrostructure features of narratives
are related to cognition. Macrostructure features of narratives capture the general
organisation and structure of a narrative (see Applebee, 1978; McCabe, 1997; Stein &
Glenn, 1979). The aspect of narrative production that was supported by the hypotheses
in the present study was the macrostructure features because they assessed children’s
ability to structure a narrative that organises what has happened in the story and why
it has happened. Specifically, it was found that children’s ability to create a social
cognitively complex narrative was significantly related to their cognitive skills, even
after controlling for demographic factors. To my knowledge, there is one other study
that has demonstrated how children’s incorporation of macrostructure information in
their narratives is associated with cognition. O’Neill, Pearce, and Pick (2004) demon-
strate that narrative production measures such as event content, perspective shift and
mental state references were predictive of children’s math-based cognitive skills.
This work has practical implications given that there are several studies aimed at
improving cognitive skills through narrative interactions based on books (see Cain &
Oakhill, 1996; Paris & Paris, 2003). The results indicate that social cognitive aspects
of narrative production, those typically associated with the macrostructure features of
narratives, are also predictive of preschoolers’ cognitive skills. Therefore, future clin-
ical assessments designed to determine cognitive abilities, either math- or language-
based, should also include narrative measures that include social cognitive reasoning
that will tap children’s ability to produce stories that have psychological causation.
Note
1. Ethnicity was a covariate because of the differential performance on the consciousness
questions. Results were equivocal regardless of whether ethnicity was covaried, but bear-
ing in mind the narrative comprehension results I decided to control for it.
Notes on contributor
Stephanie M. Curenton earned her PhD in developmental and community psychology from
the University of Virginia. After receiving her degree, she spent two years as a Society for
Research on Child Development Policy Fellow, examining early care and education interven-
tions and policies in the Administration for Children and Families, Child Care Bureau. Dr.
Curenton studies the development of low-income and minority children within various
14 S.M. Curenton
ecological contexts such as parent–child interactions, early childhood education programmes

and related state and federal policies. She has been the principal investigator on a National
Research Council Pre-doctoral Fellowship from the Ford Foundation and several university-
funded research projects. Presently, she serves as the co-director for a federally funded study
with the Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) that investigates the impact of pre-K
expansion on child care for low-income families. This project is funded by a grant from the
US Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Program Research and Evalua-
tion. Dr. Curenton has been recognised as a national leader in the early education field
through her appointment to the governing board of the National Association for the Education
of Young Children (NAEYC).
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Appendix 1
Illogical narratives
Description: These stories seem illogical and are hard to follow. When reading these stories it
is difficult to determine what page the child is referring to. The child is not using the pictures
to guide his story.
Example: That’s a dog, and this a kid, and this a frog. This a dog, and this a kid. And the
bumblebee come out. That’s a dog. That’s not a bumblebee.
Action-based narratives
Description: The descriptions of the pictures are clear and accurate. They are describing the
actions and scenes from the pictures, but these descriptions are not linked. There is no evidence
of a storyline; the child seems to be merely describing a sequence of pictures. These stories
have no information about why the character is doing certain things (i.e. his internal states).
Example: It has a window. The dog has a glass on its head. The dog jumped out of the window.
The boy jumped out of the window. It had … he’s lost. It’s raining. A bee come bited his nose.
The boy’s looking in the hole in the tree. The owl knocked him off the tree. He’s on a rock.
He’s on a reindeer. He’s still on the reindeer. He’s falling into the water. The boy and the dog
got on the log. There was frogs. He’s holding the frog.
Consciousness-based narratives
Description: The descriptions of the pictures are clear and accurate. These stories reflect the
basics of the plot: (1) the frog is gone, and (2) the boy is looking for his frog. There may be
statements like, ‘The frog is gone,’ or ‘The boy is looking for him.’ These stories reflect the
character’s internal states. There may be statements like, ‘He is trying to find his frog,’ or ‘He
looked in there, but the frog wasn’t there.’ These stories may contain dialogue, such as ‘He said
“Frog, where are you?”’ or ‘Frog, oh, frog!’ There may be resolution at the end, such as ‘He
went home with his frog,’ or ‘He found his frog.’
Example: The frog is in the can. The dog is going to eat. Then the frog got out. Then the boy
went to sleep. And then the boy wake up, and he said, ‘Where’s the frog?’ Then he looked in
his food. And then he opened the window. Then his dog stuck his head in the can. Then the
dog broke the can. Then he went outside, called for the frog. The boy thought it was in there.
He thought it was in there, but he was [restart] … it was a beaver. Then he wasn’t that, but it
wasn’t in there. Then the boy called in there. Then the owl came out. Then the boy climbed
down a rock. Then called for his dog and frog. Then a deer came and carried the boy. And then
there was the dog, and that was his dog. Then the deer dropped them. Then they fell in the
water. And he was doing to get out. He got on the log. And there was a frog. And there was his
frog! Then his pants fell down.
Appendix 2. Experimenters’ story

p. 1. Once upon a time there was a boy named Robert. Robert had a dog and a frog and he loved
them both very much.
p. 2. One night while Robert was asleep his frog snuck out of the jar and ran away.
p. 3. The next morning when Robert woke up, he was surprised to find that his frog had run
away. Robert was sad.
p. 4. He wanted to find his frog. He looked everywhere, even inside his boots. The dog tried to
help by looking in the jar.
p. 5. Robert and his dog looked out the window. He yelled, ‘Frog, where are you?’
p. 6. The dog wanted to go outside to look for the frog. So he jumped out of the window.
p. 7. Robert was very upset with the dog for jumping out of the window. ‘Jumping out of the
window is dangerous. You could get hurt,’ said Robert.
18 S.M. Curenton
p. 8. Robert and the dog headed out into the woods to find the frog. Again, Robert yelled loudly
into the woods, ‘Frog, where are you?’
p. 10. Robert looked in a hole.
p. 11. And a mole jumped out and pinched him on the nose.
pp. 12–13. Robert climbed a tree and looked inside the hollow.
pp. 14–15. An owl flew out of the tree and knocked him down.
p. 16. The owl kept flying overhead, bothering Robert. ‘Leave me alone,’ he told the owl.
p. 17. Robert climbed a rock. He leaned on some long, skinny, black things to balance himself.
Then he looked further out into the woods.
p. 18. Suddenly, a deer sprung up and lifted Robert onto its head.
p. 19. The deer carried Robert to a cliff.
pp. 20–21. And threw him over into a pond. Robert was very scared.
p. 22. He landed headfirst into the pond.
p. 23. He sat up and his dog jumped on top of his head. Then Robert heard a croaking sound
coming from behind the log.
p. 24. ‘Ssh’, he told the dog.
p. 25. Then he and the dog climbed over the log.
p. 26. Behind the log, they found a mommy and daddy frog cuddled together.
p. 27. Next they saw a group of baby frogs. And Robert’s frog was with them! The frog leaped
up because he was so happy to see Robert!
pp. 28–29. Robert waved good-bye to the frog family as he, his dog, and his frog headed home.
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Understanding the landscapes of stories: The association between

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Early Child Development and Care

Understanding the landscapes of stories: the association between

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Understanding the landscapes of stories: the association between

Seventy-two African-American and European American low-income preschoolers

ISSN 0300-4430 print/ISSN 1476-8275 online

Narratives and cognition

frequently in research to elicit children’s fictional narratives, examining children’s

Syntactic features of narratives

results failed to reveal any significant differences between African-American

Table 1. Narrative comprehension questions.

summed in order to provide an overall score for language/cognitive skills. A higher

Narratives and cognitive skills

Table 4. Proportion (and number) of children with consciousness scores by ethnicity.

Table 5. Hierarchical regression analysis for variables predicting cognitive/language scores.

Figure 1. Mean cognitive/language score by narrative quality.

engage in meta-representational skills). According to the theory of mind literature,

ecological contexts such as parent–child interactions, early childhood education programmes

Bamberg, M. (1997). Narrative development: Six approaches. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence

Appendix 2. Experimenters’ story

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