One decade later, Relating Events in Narrative, Volume 2: Typological and Contextual Perspectives is the follow up to the 1994 publication, Relating Events in Narrative: A Crosslinguistics Developmental Study (by Ruth Berman and Dan Slobin). Because both books explore a range of topics using Mercer Mayer’s picture book, Frog: where are you? as the research vehicle, the Relating Events volumes have become known to our publishing team as the Frog Story books.

The new volume brings together international scholars who have all used Frog: where are you? for their crosslinguistic research. The book is divided into two parts: Part 1 of this book focuses on factors of linguistic typology in frog story research, while Part 2 presents different perspectives on the genre of frog story narrative. These perspectives include theory of mind, bilingualism, and second language acquisition.

The present volume deals with American Sign Language, Arrernte, Basque, English, Hebrew, Icelandic, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Tzeltal, Warlpiri and West Greenlandic. That makes fourteen languages and six phyla, compared to five languages and three phyla in Volume I. The theme that runs throughout the chapters is that crosslinguistic variation is as different in content and cognitive aspects as it is in language form.