Developmental profile: Christa

Christa’s file 1 documents her mastery of the target grammatical constraints on word order and verb inflection at the onset of the study (cf. also Table 3.40). Christa makes an extensive use of referential shifts in this narrative, but does not always mark changes in perspective explicitly or fails to reintroduce characters unambiguously which leads to referential ambiguities. Also, backgrounded information remains generic, at times, which makes it difficult to follow some of the narrative episodes unless acquainted with the picture story. Language mixing occurs occasionally only, affecting only specific sentential patterns (interrog- atives in file 1, constructions with pam in file 3) or specific lexical expressions (combinations with the verb be in file 1 or have in file 3). Christa’s progress in her development of DGS is reflected in her file 3 narrative, a cohesive and coherent narrative, in which figure-ground relations are expressed in a concise manner, reference forms are chosen appropriately in accordance with the narrative function they fulfil, and temporal and causal relations are made explicit.