Children from Different Ages Tell a Fictional Account Together. A Study with Children from Urban Marginalized Populations.

ALAM, FLORENCIA; ROSEMBERG, CELIA RENATA; MIGDALEK, MAIA JULIETA

Seattle

Congreso; SCRD Biennial Meeting; 2013

Society for Research in Child Development

P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } This study aims to analyze the fictional accounts that 4-year-old children from urban marginalized populations in Argentina produced in interactions with 12-year-old children. The theoretical perspective, consistent with current psycholinguistic models (Nelson, 2007), assumes that narrative development involves interaction with discourse models provided by cultural partners (peers or adults). According to the approach of Conversational Analysis, it is assumed that the construction of meaning results from an overlapping of action, verbal language, gesture, body position, direction of gaze, and context (Gardner & Forrester, 2010).The data consists of 70 accounts interactively produced by 35 four-year-old children and 35 twelve-year-old children in induced situations. The children were given a series of images and were asked first to tell a story looking at the images (UI), and afterwards without looking at them (NUI). The data was video-recorded and transcribed according to the Code for the Human Analysis of Transcripts (MacWhinney & Snow, 1985). A system of categories was inductively constructed (Glaser & Strauss, 1991) that identified the different narrative roles (Goodwin, 2007) assumed by the participants and the way in which these roles were negotiated in the interaction. These categories were represented as flowcharts (Duncan, 2007). The flowcharts were designed in order to show: a) the role - story-teller, tutor or audience- assumed by one participant, and b) the ratification (Goffman, 1967) or not of that role by the other, and his own role assumption. In this way the construction of the account as an interactional process is represented. In figure 1 and figure 2 examples of flowcharts are showed. Each shape represents the actions - role assumption and ratification- performed by each participant -younger and older child-. The last shape of the chart, the white rhombus, shows the result of the interaction: a collaborative narrative (CN) (figure 1), a younger child?s independent narrative (YCN) (figure 2) or an older child?s independent narrative (OCN).Findings show that the children were able to co-construct CN in most of the cases. Differences were found between the two types of tasks: in the NUI accounts there was an increase in the CN (66.66%) compare to the UI ones (60.87%), as well as a decrease in the YCN (21.74% UI vs 14.29% NUI). OCN had a low increase in the NUI (17.39% NUI vs 19.05% UI). These differences can be explained due to the greater difficulty in the NUI task, which made the older children adopt a tutor role in a greater extent. The results of this study show the productivity of articulating the psycholinguistic perspective with tools of the Conversational Analysis to account for narrative development.