Early Development of Narrative Skills Revisited: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Stories Told by Toddlers

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Integrative Statement

Conversational storytelling is an important source through which very young children learn about themselves, their families, and their culture’s beliefs and values (Miller, Fung, Lin, Chen, & Boldt, 2012). Through these conversations between children and their families, notions of self-concept as situated within cultural practices emerge (Nelson, 2008; Wang, 2004). These notions include, but are not limited to constructs of self-esteem (Miller & Cho, 2018), emotion management (Wang, 2001), and emerging gender identity (Fivush & Buckner, 2008).

Although considerable research has examined the social content of these stories and the practices involved in their telling, little work has investigated the nature and conversational origins of the semantic content of the earliest stories told by children in the preschool years. This omission seems particularly striking given that (a) narrative structure and coherence have been studied extensively (e.g., Nicolopoulou, 2008); and (b) maternal reminiscing style has been frequently demonstrated to predict children’s developing autobiographical memory (Fivush, Haden, & Reese, 2006). This work extends the research of the authors (1996) who examined the semantic-syntactic content of the stories told by eight African American children ages 24 to 42 months in the course of their everyday conversation. This work demonstrated that the amount of information newly contributed to an episode of narrativelike talk varied by both the genre (temporal versus fictional) of the narrative and the gender of the child.

For the present study, we analyzed verbatim transcripts from 67.5 hours of observations of 15 toddlers (ages 24 to 42 months) living in rural Indiana working-class families and 23 additional hours of data from observations of 11 toddlers living in rural Alabama poor families. Episodes of narrativelike talk, defined as contiguous topic-centered utterances in which the child mentioned at least one event displaced temporally or fictionally from the present and one other related utterance, were identified. Once identified, episodes were coded for the number of events, states, and goals they contained and the semantic-syntactic content (operationalized as free and bound morphemes) children incorporated into their telling of the story. All morphemes were additionally coded as originating in the talk of the adult interlocutor or in the talk of the child.

Earlier work with these data demonstrated that although the African American children told far more narratives per hour, the both groups of children incorporated similar numbers of events, state, and goals into their narrative productions. The current analyses suggest a similar finding with regard to the number of morphemes children incorporated into each story. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the development of narrative competence in the earliest months of conversational storytelling.

Authors

• Douglas E. Sperry, Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College
  Presenting Author

• Linda L. Sperry, Indiana State University
  Non-Presenting Author