Children's use of evaluative devices in spoken and written narratives

Abstract This study investigated the development of evaluation in narratives from middle to late childhood, within the context of differentiating between spoken and written modalities. Two parallel forms of a picture story were used to elicit spoken and written narratives from fourth- and sixth-graders. It was expected that, in addition to an increase of evaluative devices with age, written narratives would exhibit a higher frequency and diversity as a result of the intrinsic differences between the two modalities. From a developmental perspective, the results showed that only few categories exhibited the expected increase with age. Qualitative analyses provided a fruitful method to illustrate developmental changes. The results further indicated that modality had the expected impact on the diversity, and on the frequency, of most categories of evaluative language. Specifically, markers of decontextualized language and categories with a high degree of syntactic complexity were prone to modality differences.