Language, objects, actions and gestures in the construction of narratives by five-year olds

ALAM FLORENCIA; ROSEMBERG, CELIA RENATA; SCHEUER, NORA; LEWINSKY, VIVIANA

Congreso; Biennal Metting SRCD; 2021

SRCD

Children play with toys and create fictional narratives while playing. Evidence indicates that children produce longer and structured narratives when playing with toys than when looking at a picture book (Pellegrini, 1987; Ilgaz & Aksu-Koc, 2005). This could be attributed to the fact that the actions that children perform with toys can constitute a physical and semiotic scaffolding that facilitates the configuration of the story. However these studies have not examined what happens when, after having created a story with toys, children renarrate it without those toys at hand. Does the previous activity with toys scaffold in some way the successive narrative? Can gestures help children in recalling the story? Gesture studies (Ping & Goldin-Meadow, 2010) have shown that producing gestures that refer to absent objects might help speakers retrieve information by connecting words to their memory of those objects and related actions. The aim of the present study is to compare narratives produced by 5 year old children when playing with toys with the immediate recall of those narratives without the toys. Fifteen 5-year-old children from a low income urban population in Argentina were interviewed individually at school. The children first listened to a narrative produced by the researcher using a set of related toys (a pirate, a monkey, a shark and a treasure). Afterwards they received another set of 4 related toys (a dragon, a princess, a prince and a necklace) and were asked to think of a story and then tell the story to the researcher. Then the researcher took the toys away and asked the children to tell the same story without the toys. The 30 narratives were videotaped and were transcribed using ELAN (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 2020). Multimodal analysis is currently in its last phase. Verbal components across both narratives produced by each child are compared according to: a) extension, in terms of number of clauses and b) narrative macrostructure (Stein & Glenn, 1976). As regards the use of objects, the c) frequency and d) function of actions deployed with toys in the first narrative are compared to those identified in the gestures produced in the second one. We expect that the narratives with the toys will be longer and convey more information than the narratives without the toys. We also predict that in the narrative without toys the children will produce gestures mostly to recreate the movement actions made with the toys or to indicate the place where the toys were before. To test these hypotheses Mix model regression analysis will be employed considering the type of narrative -with or without the toys- as the predictor, and the child as the random effect.As the narratives are transcribed and we have already analysed the narrative macrostructure of the narratives without the toys for a previous work (Author et al., 2019), we consider it will be feasible to have the complete analysis done for the poster presentation.