The voices within narratives: The development of intertextuality in young children's stories

Abstract

Abstract In recent years we've come to understand how fully even young speakers acquire more than grammar, learning, in addition, how language is used variously across different registers and genres. However, young speakers are learning more than the rules of baby talk or story telling. They are discovering that naturally occurring speech is a rich mix of voices and forms, where the moves between perspectives and kinds of text convey meaning as certainly as the words do. In the following paper, we use longitudinal observations of children's narratives to describe how this occurs.