Argumentation, narration and explanation during mealtimes in the homes of Argentinian young children.

STEIN, ALEJANDRA; MIGDALEK, MAIA JULIETA; FRANCO, AILIN; GONZALEZ LYNN, ELIANA

Philadelphia

Congreso; 15th Congress of the International Association for the Study of Child Language; 2020

Argumentation, narration and explanation during mealtimes in the homes ofArgentinian young children.The mastery of argumentation, explanation and narration constitutes a requisite forparticipating in classroom activities (Heller, 2014). Decontextualized talk in these discourseunits predicts vocabulary development, written text production and comprehension (Snow etal., 2007). Despite these units being interwoven in the natural interactions in which childrenare embedded, prior research on discourse development has mainly analyzed each form inisolation. Here we study the structure and interactional characteristics of narrative,explanatory and argumentative accounts interwoven in natural interactions during mealtimesat home.Data consists of 181 discourse units audio-recorded without the presence of anobserver in the homes of 11 middle-income Argentinian 4 year old Spanish monolingualchildren. Following Quasthoff et al. (2017) we identified the discourse units as segmentsdelimited from the surrounding turn-by-turn talk; each type serving to a differentcommunicative function. We carried out Chi-square test and Kruskal?Wallis one-wayanalysis of variance to determine differences between discourse units regarding frequency,extension, child role, among other structural and interactional properties.Results showed narratives are the more frequent (42%) and extensive units asmeasured by turns (18) (H (2) =58.8,p