Table 1.

Evaluative language in the narratives of children with WS and typical controls

Group	Age (Y;M)	Narrative excerpt
WS	7;11	“And then the boy wakes up and deer… the deer that’s angry. The boy and the dog fall down into the swamp, and they almost drowned! But phew, it was just a little bit swampy”.
WS	9;11	“The boy says, ‘Froooog, come out here, you little bitsy frog!’”
WS	10;3	“Here’s the boy and the dog. And the frog’s gone. The frog went away. I don’t see any frog anywhere. Do you see the frog?”.
TD	5;4	“The boy thinks that the frog is inside that hole but he isn’t”.
TD	7;4	“and he’s climbing the tree to look in the hole to see if the frog’s in there”.
TD	10;3	“and the boy said ‘quiet’ to the dog because the boy was going to look in a log for the frog”.

Note: All excerpts pertain to the search for the frog in the book Frog, Where Are You? When the typical controls narrated the story, they often explicitly conveyed the purpose or motivation for the character’s behaviors. However, when participants with WS discussed the same event, they often used social evaluative devices to perform as the haracter, thereby engaging the audience in the performance (from Losh et al., 2004).