Psychology of Language and Communication 2005, Vol. 9, No. 1 IRINA OVCHINNIKOVA Perm State University, Perm Introduction The purpose of this research is to establish the variety of expanded narratives generated by children aged 6 based on a series of pictures, which is determined by his or her individual neuropsychological characteristics, as well as by the matu- rity of perception and of processing visual-spatial information. The material of the research is a number of stories produced by Russian chil- dren based on the wordless book “Frog where are you?”. The 24 picture series telling the story of a boy and his dog searching for a runaway frog is standard material for studying the narratives of children speaking different languages (Berman & Slobin, 1994), allowing for insights into the norm and deviation in verbal and cognitive development (cf. Clifford, Reilly, & Wulfeck, 1995; Norbury VARIETY OF CHILDREN’S NARRATIVES AS THE REFLECTION OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN MENTAL DEVELOPMENT * The variety of narrative development reflects individual differences in the rate of neuropsy- chological development: evolution of different hemisphere strategies of information pro- cessing and regulative function. Regulative function in a narrative generated to a wordless book or pictures performs the key role because it provides hierarchical structure and seman- tic programming (global structure). The visual-spatial information processing essentially influences global and local structures of such kind of stories. Many specific features of narratives – incompleteness, omission in the narrative field and distortion of the narrative line, lexical substitutions, syntactical simplicity – are connected with the immaturity of the gestalt strategy of visual-spatial information processing. The visual-spatial information pro- cessing turns out to be one of the neuropsychological prerequisites for complex speech programming, especially for a narrative as a discourse type. * This research is supported by RFBR (05-06-80070). Address for correspondence: Irina Ovchinnikova, Perm State University, ul. Bukireva 15, Perm 614990, Russia. E-mail: iri-ovchinniko@yandex.ru