Abstract
Learning to narrate events requires learning to provide adequate background information to the story (Menig-
Peterson & McCabe, 1978). One way of doing this is to provide such information at the segment of the narrative
discourse that constitutes its start or opening, and to present background information about the events that are
about to happen by specifying who, where, when (i.e., scene-setting elements) (Berman & Slobin, 1994; Berman,
2001). Studies with speaking children show that the younger the children are, the less information they provide
to set the scene in their narratives (Peterson, 1990; Umiker-Sebeok, 1979; Peterson & McCabe, 1983; Berman,
2001). However, these studies are conducted with children who are required to translate events presented
usually in spatial-visual mode (as in the case of picture-story narrations) into sequential segments of verbal
output, thus causing a particular kind of cognitive demand (Berman & Slobin, 1994). The aim of the current
study is to track the developmental patterns in learning to set the narrative scene and introduce referents in
narrations produced by hearing children acquiring Turkish and deaf children acquiring Turkish Sign Language
(T ́’urk I ̇ ̧saret Dili, TI ̇D) natively (i.e., from their deaf parents). The data were collected from three age groups in
TI ̇D and Turkish: Younger children between 3;5-6;8 years, older children between 7;2-9;11, and adults. There
were 10 participants in each age group in each language. The participants were asked to narrate a picture story
(Balloon Story, Karmiloff-Smith, 1981) to a deaf or a hearing person depending on the language condition. All
the data were annotated and coded by deaf and hearing research assistants for the linguistic elements used to
set the scene at the beginning of the narration (i.e., who, where, what information for the first picture) and the
use of explicit linguistic forms to introduce the referents (i.e., the boy, the balloon man, the balloon). The results
of the analyses showed that TI ̇D-signing and Turkish-speaking children became adult-like in expressing scene
setting elements at similar ages: In both languages, older age children, but not younger age children, were
similar to adults in how frequently they used different types of scene setting elements. As to referent
introduction, even younger children in both languages were adult-like in making explicit referrals (e.g., using
lexical signs in TI ̇D and noun phrases in Turkish) to different referents in Balloon Story. Thus, the modality
difference between TI ̇D and Turkish does not seem to play a role in the acquisition of narrative skills by signing
and speaking children
