STORY-BASED COMMUNICATION WITH YOUNG CHILDREN: COGNITIVE, LINGUISTIC, EMOTIONAL AND RESILIENCE OUTCOMES THROUGH INTERACTIVE STORYTELLING

Story-based communication is a high-leverage developmental context in early childhood because it integrates language, cognition, emotion, and social understanding within shared meaning-making. This paper synthesizes theoretical and empirical research on story reading, oral storytelling, and co-constructed narratives, with specific attention to feedback as a mechanism that both reveals and shapes comprehension. We argue that interactive storytelling outperforms passive exposure by promoting inferential processing, vocabulary growth, sustained attention, and emotion understanding through contingent adult-child dialogue. Evidence from cognitive neuroscience suggests that narrative listening recruits distributed networks supporting semantic integration and mental imagery, particularly in enriched literacy environments. Developmental studies indicate predictable growth in narrative competence from single-event recounts states. Socio-cultural theory frames story-based interaction as mediated learning in which children internalize cognitive tools through guided participation. Within this synthesis, we introduce ReNIMo, a responsive framework integrating cognitive activation, linguistic expansion, emotional mentalization, and adaptive meaning-making. ReNIMo foregrounds calibrated scaffolding and feedbacksensitive dialogue as core features of effective pedagogical communication practice. We outline classroom-aligned good practices, including think-aloud modeling, dialogic questioning, visual documentation, and structured coconstruction. We also discuss ethically grounded opportunities for AI-supported conversational engagement as a supplementary tool for narrative practice. Pedagogical implications emphasize culturally relevant story selection, systematic documentation of narrative growth, and stage-appropriate scaffolding. Future research directions include longitudinal classroom studies, bilingual-context investigations, and careful evaluation of digital narrative tools under ethical constraints.