Oral narratives are crucial for evaluating youngsters since they reveal a plethora of
information about young children's language development. This study aimed to investigate the development
of narrative productivity, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity and in Cypriot-Greek-speaking children
during preschool and primary school years. An additional aim was to measure the effect of the children’s
gender in their performance on the measures of narratives. Methods: One hundred and twenty-nine typically
developing Cypriot-Greek-speaking children were recruited for the study. Results: The results showed that the
linguistic structure of narrations reflects a subtle developmental trend. As expected, older children tended to
produce longer and syntactically more complex stories than the younger ones, which is in line with previous
studies. There were significant differences in all productivity measures between the four-year-olds and those
aged seven and ten years old. In addition, the results illustrated that there was not any significant effect of
gender in the measures of narrative skills. Specifically, gender did not affect the children’s performance in the
sample. Boys and girls had similar narrative measurements in all the variables. Conclusions: This study aims
to provide initial evidence in retelling narrative development patterns on typically developing Cypriot-Greek
speaking children that could be used by speech and language to compare children’s performance and detect
language disorders.
Τεχνολογικό Πανεπιστήμιο Κύπρου
