Clause-initial AND usage in a cross-sectional and longitudinal corpus of school-age children's narratives.
Jeffrey E Kallay, Melissa A Redford
PMID 32321604WHAT IT FOUND
Frequent use of the word "and" to start sentences in children's stories reflects their developing grammar, not their ability to organise a narrative.
High "and" usage does not indicate poor storytelling structure, so clinicians should not interpret it as a deficit in conceptual development.
Key findings
01The frequency of clause-initial "and" did not vary systematically with the children's age or the year of the study.
02Narrative coherence and cohesiveness improved with age, but these structural measures did not predict how often children used "and".
03Mean length of clause, a measure of language complexity, was the only factor significantly related to "and" usage.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used a specific elicitation method (wordless picture books) which may not reflect how children use "and" in everyday conversation. The narrative structure was judged by lay adults via crowdsourcing, which may differ from clinical assessment tools. The sample was small (60 children) and predominantly from households with higher education levels, limiting generalisability. The unexpected direction of the relationship between clause length and "and" usage suggests the measures may not fully capture the complexity of the children's language.
Declared interests
The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (N.I.H., Extramural). No other conflicts of interest are declared in the provided text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret a child's frequent use of "and" as evidence of poor narrative structure. The study found that "and" usage tracked language complexity, not narrative coherence, meaning a child can tell a well-organised story while still relying heavily on "and".