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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.
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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

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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.

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