Intervention procedures as a tool for improving and evaluating children's narratives.

This presentation relates results of different research projects that have studied the role of intervention procedures on children's narratives, considered from the point of view of causality, temporality and a mind-oriented approach to the story characters. The general procedure consisted in having children tell a story - based on five pictures concerning a misunderstanding, called the Stone Story - before and after one of three types of interventions: 1) The Conversational intervention, where children participated in a conversation with the Experimenter who asked about the causes of events or the motivations of the characters' behavior, without however providing any answers; 2) The Model intervention, where children told their second narrative after listening to the story told by the experimenter and 3) The Control intervention where children played a memory game with the story pictures. One week later, the "stability" of the eventual changes occurred in the narratives immediately after the intervention was measured and, in some studies, also the ability to "generalize" mind-oriented, and causal elements more in general, on an analogous story. Moreover, children's performance on two false belief tasks were also gathered. Results show in general that from age six on, children of the "conversation" and of the "model" groups improved, significantly more then the control group, the overall coherence and mind-oriented causal plot of the story in their second narrative. Concentrating on a recent study of 84 children aged 5 to 8 years, where the conversation and the control interventions were used, we will show that improvements of the "conversation" group are stable and generalizable, and are related to success in ToM tasks, confirming the role of the conversational intervention in improving the coherence of children's narratives and its usefulness as an assessment tool.