Liliana Tolchinsky

University of Barcelona

Expository and narrative texts in speech and writing: psycholinguistic and typological perspectives

The paper will focus on developing discourse from a range of perspectives, including thematic content, global text structure, rhetorical devices, referencing, grammatical constructions, and the lexicon across development. The aim is to show how the different modalities of speech versus writing affect text production in both narrative and expository discourse, with constraints of online processing in real time interacting with the distinct socio-communicative functions of different genres. Three studies that were conducted by members of a cross-linguistic project on developing literacy (Berman & Verhoeven, 2002) will be discussed. The first shows the development of a depersonalised discourse stance; the second dwels on Developing noun phrase complexity and the third one on spoken and written text production of children with early brain damage. The studies exemplify how bottom-up linguistic categories interface with top-down global segments to express different types of discourse stance (Berman, Ragnarsdóttir, & Strömqvist, 2002). Underlying the presentations are developmentally-oriented analyses of linguistic systems in different languages - Catalan, English, French, Hebrew, and Spanish-, reflecting the impact of language-particular typologies and cultural systems on text production, on the one hand, and the importance of shared developmental processes, on the other.