Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-dfsvx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-29T14:50:24.586Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The who, when and where of early narratives*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Carole Peterson
Carole Peterson*
Affiliation:
Memorial University of Newfoundland
*
Department of Psychology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St John's, Newfoundland, A1B 3X9, Canada.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

To be well understood, narratives need to be embedded within appropriate contextual information. The early development of key orientation (participants, location and time) was traced with an 18-month longitudinal study of real-experience narratives produced by 10 children aged approximately 2–3; 6. Listener knowledge or inference was required to decode most named participants and many were not specified at all. There was no developmental improvement. Orientation to when was rare at first and involved formula words indiscriminately applied. There was steady developmental improvement in frequency as well as differentiation of time references. where information was more common at all ages, particularly when the narrated events occurred away from home. It also showed developmental improvement, but only for away-from-home locations. Overall, very young children can produce narratives in an unscaffolded context to adults unfamiliar with their experiences. The potential role of parental scaffolding in teaching orientation skills is discussed.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , June 1990 , pp. 433 - 455
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

The author would like to thank Pamela Dodsworth for her invaluable help in data collection; the transcript data analysed here have also been used by her for other work as part of her Master's thesis. Also, thanks are extended to Michael Bruce-Lockhart for help in manuscript preparation. This research was supported by National Science and Engineering Research Council grant A0513, as well as additional funds from both the Dean of Science and Department of Psychology, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

References

REFERENCES

Brown, R. (1973). A first language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eisenberg, A. R. (1985). Learning to describe past experiences in conversation. Discourse Processes 8. 177–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fivush, R., Gray, J. T. & Fromhoff, F. A. (1987). Two-year-olds talk about the past. Cognitive Development 2. 393–409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flavell, J. H. (1985). Cognitive development (2nd edition). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Hudson, J. (1986). Memories are made of this: general event knowledge and development of autobiographic memory. In Nelson, K. (ed.), Event knowledge. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Kernan, K. T. (1977). Semantic and expressive elaboration in children's narratives. In Ervin-Tripp, S. & Mitchell-Kernan, C. (eds), Child discourse. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1982). Speech actions and reactions in personal narrative. In Tannen, D. (ed.), Analyzing discourse: text and talk. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Labov, W. & Waletzky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis: oral versions of personal experience. In Helm, J. (ed.), Essays on the verbal and visual arts. Seattle: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
McCartney, K. A. & Nelson, K. (1981). Children's use of scripts in story recall. Discourse Processes 4. 59–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Menig-Peterson, C. (1975). The modification of communicative behavior in preschool-aged children as a function of the listener's perspective. Child Development 46, 1015–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Menig-Peterson, C. & McCabe, A. (1978). Children's orientation of a listener to the context of their narratives. Developmental Psychology 14. 582–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, P. J. & Sperry, L. L. (1988). Early talk about the past: the origins of conversational stories of personal experience. Journal of Child Language 15. 293–315.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nelson, K. & Ross, G. (1980). The generalities and specifics of long-term memory in infants and young children. In Perlmutter, M. (ed.), Nevi directions for child development. Vol. 10. Children's memory. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Google Scholar
Perlmutter, M. (ed.) (1980). Nevi directions for child development. Vol. 10. Children's memory. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Google Scholar
Peterson, C. & McCabe, A. (1983). Developmental psycholinguistics: three ways of looking at a child's narrative. New York: Plenum.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Polanyi, L. (1982). Linguistic and social constraints on storytelling. Journal of Pragmatics 6. 509–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Polanyi, L. (1985). Telling the American story. Norwood NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Preece, A. (1987). The range of narrative forms conversationally produced by young children. Journal of Child Language 14. 353–73.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sachs, J. (1983). Talking about the there and then: the emergence of displaced reference in parent-child discourse. In Nelson, K. E. (ed.), Children's language. Vol. 4. New York: Gardner Press.Google Scholar
Schieffelin, B. B. & Eisenberg, A. R. (1984). Cultural variation in children's conversations. In Schiefelbusch, R. L. & Pickar, J. (eds), Communicative competence: acquisition and intervention. Baltimore, MD: University Park Press.Google Scholar
Todd, C. & Perlmutter, M. (1980). Reality recalled by preschool children. In Perlmutter, M. (ed.), New directions for child development. Vol. 10. Children's memory. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Google Scholar
Umiker-Sebeok, D. J. (1979). Preschool children's intraconversational narratives. Journal of Child Language 6. 91–109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar