The impact of interactional conditions on the management of referent competition in narratives

This study dealt with the managing of the competition between referents and the choice of referring expressions (RE) for their subsequent mentions. Two interactional conditions were considered: mothers telling a story with their child were compared to other adults telling the same story to an experimenter. Results showed that the choice of pronouns, nouns and dislocations was determined by the joint influence of several factors: the interactional setting, the type of characters, the amount of competition between characters and syntactic function. The impact of each factor varied according to the type of RE. In addition, mothers showed specific behaviors: they used dislocations to a greater extent and tended to reduce the risk of competition between characters. These specificities can be interpreted both as forms of the scaffolding mothers provide to support their children’s participation in the narrative task and as potential models of reference construction children experience.