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

ALAM F.; ROSEMBERG C. R.; SCHEUER, N.; LEWINSKY, V.

online

Encuentro; Biennial Meeting of Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD); 2021

Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD)

Children play with toys and create fictional narratives while playing (Nelson, 1996; Nicolopoulou & Richner, 2004). Evidence indicates that children's narratives are longer and better structured when playing with toys than when looking at a picture book or with a direct elicited prompt (Pellegrini, 1987; Ilgaz & Aksu-Koc, 2005). This might be due to the fact that the actions that children perform with toys constitute a physical and semiotic scaffolding that facilitates the construction of the story.However, at the same time, using toys while narrating might lead children to rely on the presence of those toys to establish references (given that this is communicatively effective in face to face interaction)(Hickmann, 1995; Givón, 1994; Goodwin, 1995; Bernárdez, 1995; Calsamiglia y Tusón, 2007), and produce narratives that are situation-dependent (Michaels, 1988)Gesture studies (Ping & Goldin-Meadow, 2010) have shown that producing gestures that refer to absent objects might help 7 and 8 year old children to retrieve information by connecting words to their memory of those objects and related actions.Previous studies have not explored the characteristics of the narratives children create immediately after playing with toys and without those toys at hand.Does the previous activity with toys scaffold in some way the successive narrative?Are there differences in the degree of dependence / independence from the context of the situation when they have and when they do not have the toys?Do children gesture to reproduce the actions made previously with the toys?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.