Poster #117 - Yes, No, Maybe So: Using Evaluative Feedback Across Contexts During Parent Child Reminiscing

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

Parent-child reminiscing can have a profound impact on development, as these discussions shape how children talk about previous experiences, maintain memories, and develop a sense of self. When parents engage children in reminiscing, they use positive, negative, and neutral evaluative feedback to scaffold their child’s input. While positive and negative evaluations have been thoroughly researched, neutral evaluations are inconsistently labeled within the literature. Many researchers combine neutral and positive evaluations for analysis, yet there is reason to believe general evaluations (e.g., “Oh, I see”) may be functionally distinct compared to affirming (e.g., “Yes, that’s right”) evaluations. As such, our present understanding of how parents use evaluative feedback may be inaccurate.

When considering this distinction, it is also important to acknowledge how conversation context might encourage the use of different evaluations. Recent research suggests that parents modify their narrative structure relative to the perceived goal of the reminiscing conversation. Given the flexible nature of neutral evaluations, parents may use them consistently across contexts, while the directional nature of positive and negative evaluations may render them more susceptible to the influence of conversation contexts.

As such, the present study explored how conversation context relates to the use of evaluative feedback during parent-child reminiscing. Children 3- to 5-years in age engaged in a brief, scripted play activity with a researcher. Afterwards, caregivers were instructed to discuss the event with their child, either in a factual way or an entertaining way. Conversations were recorded, transcribed, and coded for the frequency of positive, negative, and neutral evaluations used by caregivers. We predicted that parents would exhibit differences in their usage of neutral, positive, and negative evaluations between conditions. Specifically, we hypothesized that parents would use neutral evaluations at a similar frequency across conversation contexts, while using fewer positive evaluations and more negative evaluations in the fact condition relative to the entertainment condition due to the increased accuracy demand associated with the fact context.

Although data collection is ongoing, preliminary analyses (n = 84, Mage = 54.93 months) partially support our hypotheses. We found that parents differed in their use of positive evaluations between conditions, with parents in the fact context (M = 37.23) using fewer positive evaluations relative to parents in the entertainment condition (M = 48.02), U = 1108, z = 2.11, p = .035, r = 0.23. No significant differences were found for neutral or negative evaluations, although the latter may have been due to the overall low frequencies of negations (M = 0.64). Most notably, no significant differences were found between conditions when positive and neutral evaluations were combined for analysis.

These preliminary results suggest that neutral and positive evaluations are indeed distinct constructs, with parents tailoring only their use of positive evaluations in relation to conversation context. However, this nuance is lost when positive and neutral evaluations are combined for analysis, as is common practice in the reminiscing literature. Thus, the present results add to a growing body of literature that highlights the importance of acknowledging neutral evaluations as conceptually unique.

Authors

• Emily Slonecker, UC Irvine
  Presenting Author

• J. Zoe Klemfuss, UC Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author