LINGUIST List 12.1300

Fri May 11 2001

Review: Children's Lg: Narrative & Discourse

Editor for this issue: Terence Langendoen <terrylinguistlist.org>

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  • Jo Tyler, Review: Nelson et al. Children's Language Vol. 10

    Message 1: Review: Nelson et al. Children's Language Vol. 10

     Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 07:22:01 -0400
    From: Jo Tyler <jtylermwc.edu>
    Subject: Review: Nelson et al. Children's Language Vol. 10


    Nelson, Keith E., Ayhan Aksu-Koc, and Carolyn E. Johnson, ed. (2001) Children's Language: Developing Narrative and Discourse Competence, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

    Jo Tyler, Center for Graduate and Professional Studies, Mary Washington College

    Developing Narrative and Discourse Competence is the tenth volume in the Children's Language series begun in 1978. It contains seven of the 276 papers presented at the 7th International Congress of the International Association for the Study of Child Language in Istanbul, Turkey in 1996. Five of the papers focus on narrative, two focus on conversational discourse, and one cuts across both domains. Thematically the discussions center primarily on issues of linguistic and cognitive development, with some attention to development of literacy and social skills as well. The studies also deal with a wide variety of languages and cultures: Australian, Canadian and American English, Israeli Hebrew, European Portuguese, Parisian and Canadian French, and Japanese.

    In this review I will summarize and then give a brief evaluative comment on each article separately, and I will conclude with a summary evaluation of the book as a whole.

    The Introduction, penned by the editors, presents detailed synopses of each article, highlighting the key contributions of each and summarizing the similarities and differences between them.

    The synopses provide a thorough preview of the book's contents, but they are presented in a different order than the chapter numbers. Chapters 1, 2, 4 and 7 are previewed together in a section about form, function and cognitive development. A second section of the Introduction, on social, emotional and cognitive processes, previews Chapters 3, 6 and 5, in that order.

    Chapter 1, Setting the Narrative Scene: How Children Begin to Tell a Story, by Ruth A. Berman, presents results of research on the development of scene-setting in children's narratives. The data are stories told by pre- school and school-aged children as well as adults. Among the key findings are (1) that linguistic elements of scene-setting become more varied with age and (2) that personal experience stories show more progressive development in length and variety of scene-setting elements than do picture book elicitations.

    The study presented in this chapter is part of an extended research program undertaken by Berman and others on narrative development in both Hebrew and English speakers. At times the distinction between the current research and earlier studies was unclear, and the data from Hebrew and English speakers was not always presented separately. However, a detailed and insightful section of the article discusses the tense-aspect system of Hebrew and how it is deployed in narrative scene-setting, concluding that it is not until adulthood that it is used appropriately for backgrounding and transitioning from orientation to action.

    Chapter 2, Representation of Movement in European Portuguese: A Study of Children's Narratives, by Hanna Jakubowicz Batoreo and Isabel Hub Faria, examines the developmental use of different linguistic cues to situate participants in narrative. The study compares the use of morpho- lexical elements and syntactic ordering devices by Portuguese-speaking children and adults. The results show that although the morphosyntactic and lexical tools of the language are acquired by about age 5, it is not until age 10 that they begin to be used consistently and appropriately for framing and anchoring participants in narrative discourse. A further finding is that syntactic cues such as highly marked presentative or existential sentence structures become functional later than morpho-lexical cues.

    This highly readable and well-organized chapter not only presents a succinct summary of the study in question, but also provides a valuable theoretical overview. Of particular interest is the typological comparison of European Portuguese with other Romance languages including Brazilian Portuguese. One complaint, however, is that line graphs were used to display data from different age groups that would have been more appropriately and accurately displayed in bar graphs or numerical tables.

    Chapter 3, Why Young American English-Speaking Children Confuse Anger and Sadness: A Study of Grammar in Practice, by Michael Bamberg, examines the syntactic structures and pragmatic goals in children's accounts of anger and sadness. For children of all ages, accounts of anger involve the prototypical SVO structure with an agentive 'other' as subject, and with the primary goal of assigning blame and a secondary goal of eliciting empathy. Accounts of saddness by older children, on the other hand, involved either 'I' or 'other' as a nonagentive subject, with the sole motive of eliciting empathy. For younger children, however, accounts of sadness, tended to follow the prototypical SVO structure associated with anger accounts. Bamberg attributes this "confusion" of the younger children not only to lack of facility with the nonprototypical nonagentive sentence structure, but more importantly to an inability to differentiate between the pragmatic goals of assigning blame and eliciting empathy.

    This engrosing article supplements the report of research with a concise discussion of theoretical views on the relationship between language, thought and emotion. Bamberg further situates his research findings within this theoretical backdrop through a summary discussion of the interaction between self-and-other as the subject of talk and the speaker-and-audience as the pragmatic framework of talk. Without straying into pop psychology, Bamberg offers an original approach to psycholinguistic research that should contribute greatly to the field.

    Chapter 4, A Crosscultural Investigation of Australian and Israeli Parents' Narrative Interactions with Their Children, by Gillian Wigglesworth and Anat Stavans, is a quantative analysis of the contributions middle-class children and parents make to the story-telling task. The data were obtained from recordings of parents telling a story from a picture book to children at ages 3, 5 and 7 in both language groups. The findings indicated that in the Australian dyads parents were more focused on the story with 5 year olds and had more conversational interaction with children at ages 3 and 7. In the Israeli dyads, however, the proportion of story focus to conversational interaction remained relatively stable across age groups, at about the same level as with the Australian 5 year olds.

    Given these findings, the authors speculate that the increased focus on the story with Australian 5 year olds is due to parents' concern to prepare or model narrative experiences similar to those in the school setting, suggesting that for Israeli parents this concern begins before the onset of schooling and continues afterwards. The impact of schooling on both parents and children in terms of narrative skill development is clearly an area for empirical study rather than speculation.

    Chapter 5, The Acquisition of Polite Language by Japanese Children, by Keiko Nakamura, makes a useful contribution to the literature on this topic. Nakamura's data was elicited from one- to five-year-old children primarily in role playing activities. In contrast to earlier researchers who concluded from spontaneous utterance data that Japanese children have not productively acquired different politeness forms until reaching school age, Nakamura hypothesized that preschool children would demonstrate appropriate use of politeness forms in role playing activities. This article gives ample evidence in support of the hypothesis. Children from the age of one year use greetings and polite expressions appropriately. By age 3 children are using addressee honorifics appropriately. Numerous examples are also given of context-appropriate use of honorific-respectful language and humble language. The errors children made in these last two categories involved morphological redundancy and overextension to an inappropriate referent. Nakamura draws the logical conclusion that although acquisition of forms and sensitivity to the appropriate context for use is acquired early, they are not found in children's spontaneous utterances since children are rarely in natural situations that require their use until reaching school age.

    This article points out the importance of elicitation tasks in determining stages of acquisition. One weakness, however, is that none of the data in Nakamura's study is quantified here. All of the findings are stated as generalities and tendencies supported only by a few data examples given for each category. There is no systematic analysis of development across age groups, even though data was collected from subjects over the span of one to three years.

    Chapter 6, Interactional Processes in the Origins of the Explaining Capacity, by Edy Veneziano, presents the results of a longitudinal study of two mother-child dyads focusing on the use of explanations to justify one's demands, assertions, etc. when opposed by the other. In these French-speaking dyads, both the mother's and the child's explanations were analyzed. The children were under two years of age at the beginning of the study which spanned 12 months. The results indicate that children progress through three stages in giving explanations: from very sporadic protests in the earliest stage to more frequent use of refusals and denials in the third stage, about 6 months later. On the other hand, from the earliest stage children readily gave in and modified their behavior in response to their mothers' explanations, indicating as Veneziano states that they learned "to be convinced before they learned to convince others" (p. 136). The study also revealed that children in the later stages become gradually less likely to give in after their mothers' explanations, suggesting that as children become more adept at providing their own explanations, they also become less responsive to others' explanations.

    This lucid and engaging article contributes a great deal to the understanding of children's pragmatic development. Although only 2 pairs of subjects were studied, a total of 591 episodes were statistically analyzed. The data reporting is meticulous, and the discussion of implications is well informed by cognitive and psychological development theory. One hopes that this research program will be expanded to test the validity of the findings presented here.

    Chapter 7, Children's Attributions of Pragmatic Intentions and Early Literacy, by Kenneth Reeder, examines the hypothesis that children with better skills in attributing pragmatic intent to speakers have better skills in narrative and explanatory writing tasks. Children in two age groups (mean ages 7 and 8, respectively) were measured and grouped according to low or high levels of attribution skill, and the writing samples were evaluated for overall rhetorical quality, quantity, and structural complexity. In general, there was a greater difference between the writing abilities of older and younger children who had high attribution levels than between those who had lower attribution levels. The author concludes that there is a "reliable contribution of skill in the attribution of intentional states in others to specific aspects of writing development" (p. 156).

    However, the fact that a correlation exists does not support a claim of causation or even a "contribution" of one variable to another. It is just as likely that the development of writing skill contributes to level of pragmatic attribution. In fact, one of the major flaws of this article is the lack of any rationale for why children's skill in attributing intentions to speakers should correlate with, let alone contribute to, their writing ability. Furthermore, the method of measuring the children's level of attribution skill is based heavily on the length and structural complexity of the child's utterances, so what was really demonstrated in this study is the not surprising correlation between children's spoken language skills and their writing ability.

    Overall Evaluation.

    One of the most intriguing contributions of this collection is the material on how different elicitation tasks affect the outcome of the research. This point is particularly emphasized in Chapters 1, 3, 5, and 7, where findings importantly elaborate or even contradict those of earlier studies conducted with different elicitation tasks.

    Another recurrent issue emphasized in these articles is the effect of schooling and literacy on children's narrative and pragmatic development. This issue arises in the concluding discussions in Chapters 1, 4, 5, and 7, but in none of these articles do the authors present empirical evidence for their conclusions about the impact of schooling on the developmental processes investigated.

    The articles in this book are all highly accessible and informative. It should be of interest not only to those studying the development of discourse skills, but also to discourse analysts in general. Several of the articles stand as excellent models of research reporting in these fields, which makes them especially appropriate for supplemental readings in post-introductory linguistics courses.

    Jo Tyler holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Florida and is Assistant Professor and coordinator of the graduate TESL Program at Mary Washington College.