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

STEIN, A.; MIGDALEK, M; ROSEMBERG, C. R.; FRANCO ACCINELLI, A.; GONZALEZ LYNN, E. B.

Congreso; 15th Congress of the International Association for the Study of Child Language; 2021

The mastery of argumentation, explanation and narration constitutes a requisite for participating in classroom activities (Heller, 2014). Decontextualized talk in these discourse units predicts vocabulary development, written text production and comprehension (Snow et al., 2007). Despite these units being interwoven in the natural interactions in which children are embedded, prior research on discourse development has mainly analyzed each form in isolation. Here we study the structure and interactional characteristics of narrative, explanatory and argumentative accounts interwoven in natural interactions during mealtimes at home.Data consists of 181 discourse units audio-recorded without the presence of an observer in the homes of 11 middle-income Argentinian 4 year old Spanish monolingual children. Following Quasthoff et al. (2017) we identified the discourse units as segments delimited from the surrounding turn-by-turn talk; each type serving to a different communicative function. We carried out Chi-square test and Kruskal?Wallis one-way analysis 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 as measured by turns (18) (H(2)=58.8,p