Character reference in young children's narratives: A crosslinguistic comparison of English, Greek, and Turkish

•Introduction function in Greek narratives develops before English and Turkish.•Local cues marking information status are acquired earlier than global cues.•Morphological richness of local cues enhances development.•Onset of referentiality in narratives appears dependent on language structure.•Referential functions in two character stories evident earlier.

This study compared the acquisition of referential expressions in preschoolers’ narratives in three typologically different languages, English, Greek, and Turkish. On the one hand, English and Greek have obligatory article systems that mark the definite/indefinite distinction, while Turkish marks it through word order along with case. On the other hand, the Greek determiner system is morphologically rich, while the English system is morphologically impoverished. A total of 157 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were tested (about 50 children per language) using two sets of picture sequences, one with a single main character and the other with two main characters. The results indicated that in introducing characters, Greek children displayed a higher level of performance than English children, who in turn did better than Turkish children. In reintroducing characters, Greek and Turkish children's performance was higher than that of English children. In maintaining characters, children of all three language groups did comparably well. The results also differed in relation to the story types used. These findings indicate that the process of acquiring appropriate referential forms for introducing, reintroducing, and maintaining characters is influenced not only by the referential discourse functions under consideration, but also by language structure and story type.