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Part of
Developmental Perspectives in Written Language and Literacy: In honor of Ludo Verhoeven
Edited by Eliane Segers and Paul van den Broek
[Not in series 206] 2017
► pp. 237–255

Development of qualifiers in children’s written stories

| | Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands
|

In general, stories written by children in which many details are used are perceived as being more attractive. However, the use of stylistic elements in children’s writings has scarcely been described. We investigated stories written by 320 elementary school children from grades 3 to 6, focusing on the qualifiers they used to describe persons, objects and actions: names, relationships, intensifiers, adjectives and adverbs, sizes, prices, colors, details, and words to express modality, place and directions. The results showed a significant growth from grade 3 to 6 in the number of qualifiers. Dutch-L1 outperformed Dutch-L2 children in almost all these qualifiers. Girls used significantly more names, intensifiers, adjectives and adverbs in their description of persons, objects and actions than boys.

Keywords: qualifiers, stylistic development, written stories, children, elementary school, lexical variation, writing skills, gender differences in language
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Informants
    • 2.2Instrumentation
    • 2.3Analyses and coding of qualifiers in the texts of the Writing Cohesion Task
    • 2.4Word Definition Task (25 items)
    • 2.5Procedure
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Tokens and types
    • 3.2Qualifiers
    • 3.3Name
    • 3.4Relation
    • 3.5Intensifiers
    • 3.6Adjective/adverb
    • 3.7Size
    • 3.8Price
    • 3.9Color
    • 3.10Detail
    • 3.11Modality/place/direction
    • 3.12Word Definition Task
    • 3.13Relation between the use of qualifiers and vocabulary
  • 4.Conclusions and discussion
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 21 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.206.15ver
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