The Manifestation of Content Schema in 5-year-oldsʹʹ Narratives and its Relationship with Language Abilities1

The study of child mental processes is not possible except by studying their manifestations. The narration of a story- as an external manifestation- can be a good evidence of childʹs prior (background) knowledge and prior content schemas. Experience shows that children who have more background knowledge and their mental schemas are more and richer, their language abilities is more- compared to other children. On the other hand, we often see that children of more language abilities have more background knowledge and schemas. Accordingly, assessing existence or lack of correlation between, the manifestation of content schemas in childrenʹs narratives and childrenʹs language abilities in narration, was the goal of this research. So, this work was a correlational one. Data collection was made in the first academic semester of 2011- 2012. Statistical sample of this investigation consisted of 100 Persian-speaking children of 5 years of age, who lived in Ilam city and viewed a short narrative cartoon, and were asked to narrate it in a 3 minutes time span. Propositional content which was the manifestation of childrenʹs prior content knowledge in narrative context and some of the linguistic features of the childrenʹs narrations were investigated. The results of the study revealed that there was a correlational positive relationship between the conceptual background knowledge- manifested in childrenʹs narratives- and linguistic outputs.