Effects of Context Task and Topic on Children’s Reports of Personal Events

BORZONE, A.M. Y PLANA. M.D.

Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Congreso; Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting; 2007

Society for Research in Child Development

The present study, which is part of a research project about the relationship between event comprehension and remembering and the use of linguistic devices for reporting these events, aimed to compare children’s performance on reporting personal experiences in two different elicitation interpersonal exchange contexts. One of the elicitation contexts provided children with some aspects of the to-be-remembered event while, in the other, children were asked to report some distinctive event experienced in a more generic (or scripted) situation. Based on the theoretical perspective adopted, developmental cognitive psychology (Nelson, 1996), and on previous research (van den Broek, Bauer & Bourg, 1997), it might be assumed that children’s performance would vary from one situation to the other as a function of the support for remembering that each one provided. Thirty-three five-year old children from low-income families living in Buenos Aires, Argentina participated in the study. Two reports of personal experiences were elicited in two different sessions. In one of them (session A) the experimenter pointed to her finger covered with a band aid and said that she had hurt herself. She then asked the child whether she/he had ever experienced something similar. In the other session (session B) the experimenter asked the child to narrate some fear situation that had occurred at night. For the analysis of the children’s reports the categories developed by Fivush et al. (2003) were used to code the amount and type of information. Coherence was analyzed with Labov and Waletzky´s (1967) structural categories for personal experiences. Results showed that children were able to give reports about distinctive events but their abilities seemed to vary according to the elicitation context. In effect, in session A, most children’s reports (93%) were coherent since they included all the structural categories that characterized personal experiences. In session B, only 30% produced coherent narratives, 13% produced incomplete ones and 26% of children’s reports reflected more general scripts about going to sleep and being afraid of darkness. Several children (31%) were unable to produce any kind of report in that situation. With regards to the amount of information recalled, children’s reports incorporated more informational units (M=28, SD=12) in session A than in session B (M=20, SD=10). However, one child’s report elicited in session B included more informational units (74) than her report in session A (36). In the first case the child reported a violent event she had witnessed: her uncle being arrested and taken away from their house by the police. The child remembered more detailed information about this very stressful event than about a more ordinary one. Overall children reported more information about actions and persons than other type of information. Two possible interrelated interpretations may account for the differential performance of children between sessions: the context created in session A provided more support for the use of retrieval strategies of events from memory and the topic proposed in session A focused on a more frequent kind of event in children´s lives.