Dalla competenza sintattica alla competenza testuale: le narrazioni dei bambini italofoni dai 4 ai 10 anni

The paper investigates the way Italian children of different ages manage syntactic and narrative competence in Italian L1. The data were elicited by the story Frog, where are you? , created in 1969 by Mercer Meyer and extensively used in several L1 and L2 studies. The study aims at identifying the cognitive prerequisites on which linguistic development is founded at the ages investigated (4, 7 and 10) together with the language specific influence that Italian may have on the way children conceptualize and express information throughout a narrative text. Some crosslinguistic questions are finally considered in order to compare our results with those concerning languages other than Italian.