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The development of coherence and complexity in the narratives of preschool-age children

University of British Columbia

The general purpose of this study was to investigate the development of storytelling abilities in 3- and 4-year-old children. The goal plan analysis developed by Trabasso and his colleagues was supplemented with portions of Berman and Slobin's plot-based model of narrative structure (1994). This composite model was used to address the specific purposes of the study. The first purpose was to determine if the children had knowledge of goal plans of action, as reflected in their narration of a complex story. The second goal was to determine if this underlying structural complexity facilitated the production of a coherent narrative and if developmental differences could be seen between the two age groups on these measures. A final purpose of the study was to compare the results with those obtained in similar studies of plot and goal plan development by Berman and Slobin (1994), Trabasso and Nickels (1992), and Trabasso, Stein, Rodkin, Park Munger and Baughn (1992). The procedures for narrative elicitation follow those laid out by Berman et al. (1986) and used in the comparison studies mentioned. Ten English-speaking 3-year-olds (ages 3;2.10 to 3;9.19) and eleven English-speaking 4-year-olds (ages 4;4.3 to 5;0.11) participated in this study. Five of the children who participated as 3-year-olds also participated as 4-year-olds, providing longitudinal data. Each child told the story two times, first when they were unfamiliar with the book (Part 1), and again after reading the book with their caregiver(s) over the course of a week (Part 3). Results from the age-based comparisons showed some small group differences in the 3- and 4-year-olds' goal plan knowledge and their ability to narrate coherent and complex narratives. Since many of these differences did not capture the qualitative differences seen between the two groups of children, composite z-scores were used to calculate complexity and coherence rankings for the subjects based on the mean of the combined group. The results of these rankings indicated that the 3-year-olds were in transition from producing locally coherent narratives with a single global goal plan to producing globally coherent and complex narratives. Ten of the eleven 4-year-old children told relatively coherent and complex narratives. These results were substantially different from those reported in the Trabasso and Berman and Slobin studies, which proposed that 3- and 4-year-olds have poor knowledge of goal plans of action and produce very simple narratives of the event or action-sequence type. It is proposed here that the differences are due to differences in experimental methodology, particularly for story and experimenter familiarity.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-01-30

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/3987

Audiology and Speech Sciences

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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