the who, when and where of early narratives
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Journal of Child Languagehttp://journals.cambridge.org/JCL
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The who, when and where of early narratives
Carole Peterson
Journal of Child Language / Volume 17 / Issue 02 / June 1990, pp 433 455DOI: 10.1017/S0305000900013854, Published online: 17 February 2009
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0305000900013854
How to cite this article:Carole Peterson (1990). The who, when and where of early narratives. Journal of Child Language, 17, pp 433455 doi:10.1017/S0305000900013854
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J. Child Lang. 17 (1990), 433-455. Printed in Great Britain
The who, when and where of early narratives*
CAROLE PETERSON
Memorial University of Newfoundland
(Received 3 January 1989. Revised 30 May 1989)
ABSTRACT
To be well understood, narratives need to be embedded within ap-propriate contextual information. The early development of key orien-tation (participants, location and time) was traced with an 18-monthlongitudinal study of real-experience narratives produced by 10 childrenaged approximately 2—3; 6. Listener knowledge or inference wasrequired to decode most named participants and many were notspecified at all. There was no developmental improvement. Orientationto WHEN was rare at first and involved formula words indiscriminatelyapplied. There was steady developmental improvement in frequency aswell as differentiation of time references. WHERE information was morecommon at all ages, particularly when the narrated events occurred awayfrom home. It also showed developmental improvement, but only foraway-from-home locations. Overall, very young children can producenarratives in an unscaffolded context to adults unfamiliar with theirexperiences. The potential role of parental scaffolding in teachingorientation skills is discussed.
INTRODUCTION
One of the most important transitions in early child language is from anexclusive focus on the 'here and now' to a capacity to talk about the 'thereand then' (Brown, 1973). Recently there has been considerable interest in theemergent abilities of children to represent verbally the 'there and then' and,in particular, personal or autobiographical experience.
[•] The author would like to thank Pamela Dodsworth for her invaluable help in datacollection; the transcript data analysed here have also been used by her for other work aspart of her Master's thesis. Also, thanks are extended to Michael Bruce-Lockhart for helpin manuscript preparation. This research was supported by National Science andEngineering Research Council grant A0513, as well as additional funds from both theDean of Science and Department of Psychology, Memorial University of Newfoundland.Address for correspondence: Carole Peterson, Department of Psychology, MemorialUniversity of Newfoundland, St John's, Newfoundland, AiB 3X9, Canada.
433
CHILD LANGUAGE
A number of researchers have found that children as young as two andthree years of age can recall and discuss past experience veridically. Forexample, Fivush, Gray & Fromhoff (1987) and Todd & Perlmutter (1980)interviewed children aged 2;5-2; 11 and 2; 11-3:2 respectively about pastexperiences and found that children as young as this readily recalled anddiscussed such events, even those that occurred more than three monthsearlier. Parents confirmed that the children's recall was generally accurate(Fivush et al. 1987). Other researchers have studied parent-child interactionsand found that narratives about past personal experience begin to comprisea regular part of this interaction from about two years of age (Sachs, 1983;Eisenberg, 1985; Miller & Sperry, 1988).
Several researchers have suggested that children's earlier representationsof past experience occur first in interactive contexts in which adults provideextensive prompting and most of the content (Perlmutter, 1980; Sachs, 1983 ;Eisenberg, 1985). For example, Eisenberg studied parent-child conversationwith two children (119-2:7 and 2:0-3:2 respectively) and found that talkabout the past could be classified into three successive phases: (1) themajority of content was provided by the adult with the child responding withyes I no or one-word nominal answers; (2) talk about the past was lessdependent upon adult prompting although the events were seldom uniquebut rather highly familiar topics of conversation between parent and child;and (3) spontaneous recall of unique past events was common. Otherresearchers have also suggested that children's representation of script orrecurrent events precedes narratives about unique events, although there arecontradictory findings in the literature (Nelson & Ross, 1980; McCartney &Nelson, 1981; Hudson, 1986). However, all agree that young children'searliest talk about the past is structured around the scaffold provided byfamiliar adults.
Even very young children interact with people who are not familiar withall their activities and events, though. Being able to narrate successfully tounknowledgeable listeners is a crucial component in the transition tocompetent 'there and then' talk, and it is important to study the earliestemergence of narratives not just within parent-child discourse but also withothers who are unfamiliar with the child's experiences. The present studydoes just this.
Structural properties of narratives about personal experience have beenextensively studied in adults (Labov & Waletzky, 1967; Labov, 1972, 1982;Polanyi, 1982, 1985) and older children (Kernan, 1977; Peterson & McCabe,1983; Preece, 1987). Narratives have been described as representations ofunique past adventures that preserve the chronology of the component eventsdiscussed; they include such things as a recounting of a car accident, a fightwitnessed or participated in, sibling squabbles, a visit to a zoo, or an injury.Such narratives are commonly sandwiched within the conversations of both
434
WHO, WHEN AND WHERE
adults and children, and even in the conversation of preschool child peers(Umiker-Sebeok, 1979; Preece, 1987).
Narratives fulfil two distinct functions, reference and evaluation. Evalu-ation conveys emotional information: the meaning or point of the narrative,what the experience meant to the speaker, and, in essence, why the narrativeis told. The crucial role of evaluation has been stressed by a number ofresearchers, including Labov & Waletzky (1967), Labov (1972, 1982), andPolanyi (1982, 1985). Even young children's narratives are by no meansdevoid of evaluation. Peterson & McCabe (1983) analysed the evaluationpresent in the narratives of children in the preschool and primary schoolyears (3; 6 to 9; 6), and found that their narratives were bristling withevaluation, even at the youngest ages. Recently, Miller & Sperry (1988) havestudied the emergence of narratives in children between 1 ;y and 2;6. Theystressed the key role played by evaluation in prompting young children'snarrative efforts, even when no explicit evaluative devices were present intheir narratives. However, important as evaluation is, it is not enough fornarrative construction.
No narrative can be understood without a well-differentiated descriptionof what happened. This is fulfilled by the other crucial function of narration,reference. One component of reference includes relating the sequence ofspecific, chronologically-ordered events comprising the experience. A secondimportant component is orientation: comprehensible narratives are em-bedded in a meaningful context of WHO the participants were, WHERE andWHEN the events took place, and so on. Polanyi (1985) has asserted that anarrative must include both chronologically-ordered event clauses andcontextualizing state clauses to be a proper narrative.
Older children have been found to embed their narratives within a fairamount of appropriate orienting context. Kernan (1977) analysed narrativesproduced by children 7-14 years of age and found that all providedconsiderable orienting information. However, about half the time hisyoungest subjects introduced a character with just a name and no otheridentifying information while older children almost never did so. In addition,younger children were more concerned with identifying specifics like time,place and characters while older children stressed background informationlike mood, motivation and circumstance, and as a result, more of theirnarratives were devoted to orientation.
Children younger than 7;o have also been studied. Umiker-Sebeok (1979)assessed the likelihood of preschoolers including orientation in their intra-conversational narratives to peers. Many of their narratives exclusivelyconsisted of event recapitulation, but although three-year-olds seldomincluded orientation in their narratives, four-year-olds were considerablymore likely to do so. Menig-Peterson & McCabe (1978) and Peterson &McCabe (1983) traced the development of orientation in the narratives of
435
CHILD LANGUAGE
children between 356 and 9;6. They found that, although older childrenprovided more sentences devoted to orientation, younger children providedthe same number of orientative comments if length of the narrative wascontrolled for. That is, younger children produced shorter narratives, andsince the number of orientative sentences produced was an almost constantproportion (about 20 % of all sentences), older children were able to providemore details of context. But younger children clearly were sensitive to theneed to provide background information. In a different analysis, the qualityof the children's orientative information was assessed, and older childrenprogressively did a better job of providing fully informative orientation towho, what, where, when and why. Although even the youngest childrenstudied fully identified almost all the props or objects playing a role in theirnarratives (' what' information), they had a more difficult time specifying whoand where, and seldom provided information concerning when or why.
The abilities of children younger than 3 ;o to embed their narratives withinappropriate orienting context has not been systematically studied, althoughEisenberg (1985) has suggested that a major reason for children's narrativesbeing so confusing is that they lack orientation. Such an analysis of earlyorienting skills is the focus of the present research. Ten children were studiedlongitudinally at monthly intervals for 18 months, beginning soon after theirsecond birthday. They were encouraged to narrate to a researcher who wasmostly unfamiliar with the events, people, and places the children talkedabout. The narratives they produced constitute the data analysed here.
METHOD
Subjects
Ten children, five boys and five girls, participated in the study. All weremiddle-class children living in two-parent homes. Three had no siblings,three had a younger sibling born during the course of the study, and four hadolder siblings. The children were 2;i (two children), 2;2 (five children)or 2;3 (three children) at the start of the study and were followed for 18months.
Procedure
The children were visited in their homes at monthly intervals by a femaleresearcher, who played with them alone for an hour. The parents were askedto provide a short list of activities that their children had been engaged induring the past month and about which they could be prompted to narrate.These included visits to the beach, the doctor, the Santa Claus parade,people's homes, birthday parties, and so on, as well as notable injuries oradventures. Since young children are more responsive to prompts en-
436
WHO, WHEN AND WHERE
couraging them to narrate when those prompts are closely related to theirexperiences (Peterson & McCabe, 1983), such information provided by theparents increased the likelihood of getting narratives from the children.
During the course of the hour visit, prompts about these experiences wereinserted at intervals (e.g. 'Have you ever seen an iceberg? Tell me about it'),as well as more general prompts such as ' Have you ever been hurt/needed abandaid ?' ' Have you ever spilled/broken anything ?' While the child wasnarrating, the researcher encouraged the child to continue without directingwhat the child said. This is often not easy to do, and recorded interactionsbetween children and both parents and teachers are filled with directivequestions such as 'Where did you go ? Who took you there ? What did we puton your knee after you scraped it ?' Because we were interested in what sortsof information children would provide on their own, we suppressed thesesorts of probes as much as possible. Instead, we used the procedure describedin Peterson & McCabe (1983): the children's utterances (or portions of them)were often repeated verbatim, usually with question intonation. In addition,non-specific prompts such as ' yeah ?' or ' and ?' were used. We found that thechildren readily continued their discourse with this sort of adult en-couragement. If a prompt was used that requested specific orientativeinformation, that narrative was not scored for the information contained inthe child's response. Only information volunteered by the child is analysed.
The interaction was audio recorded. In sum, 18 hours of interaction wererecorded for each of the 10 children over an 18-month period, or 180 hoursin all.
Definition of a narrative
We defined a narrative as a recounting of a specific past event. The child hadto produce two or more utterances relevant to that event - in this, ourdefinition matches that of Labov & Waletzky (1967), Labov (1972, 1982),Peterson & McCabe (1983) and Polanyi (1982, 1985), and departs from thatof Miller & Sperry (1988). The latter required only one utterance referringto the past to include it as a narrative. Utterances were defined as independentclauses with their associated dependent clauses (see Peterson & McCabe,
1983)-The content of the child's narrative had to involve DISTANT PAST, i.e. events
that had occurred at least some hours earlier; this matches Miller & Sperry's(1988) definition of distant past and Sachs' (1983) definition of earlier past asdistinguished from immediate past. In addition, talk about fantasy events,generic narratives such as discussion of habitual actions or events, futuretime narratives, and retellings of familiar fairy tales and stories were notincluded in the data.
437
CHILD LANGUAGE
TABLE i. The children's ages and MLUs
Child
DannySusanToddNathanCathyLisaGaryHelenPaulKelty
Initiulage
2; 1
2; 1
2 ; 2
2 ; 2
2 ; 2
2 ; 2
2J2
2 :32 ;32J3
InitialMLU
2 3 93 2 42 2 42 2 92 9 63 2 2
3 4 22 0 0
2-773 7 1
Number of samples
<2-s
1
0
2
1
0
0
0
2
0
0
<3-o
1
0
40
1
0
0
1
1
0
< 3 5
31
2
2
1
41
42
I
with MLUs
< 40
1
2
342
40
0
2
1
> 4-0
1 2
'57
1 1
141 0
171 1
1316
RESULTS
Production of narratives and examples
The language sophistication of the children as measured by MLU istabulated in Table 1; most of the children quickly passed MLUs of 40. Thechildren's production of narratives (both number and average length) isgiven in Table 2. In total, the children produced 1365 narratives - clearly itis possible to elicit substantial numbers of narratives from children under3; 6. Thus, the issue in the study of early narratives is not whether or notchildren produce them to relatively unfamiliar adults, but rather what formthey take. Specifically, our concern in this paper is with contextualembedding.
Many of the narratives of the children, particularly at early ages, werealmost devoid of contextual information. For example, there was thisexchange between Todd, aged 2; 6, and the researcher:
T : I gonna bring this (a taperecorder).R: Where are you gonna bring it ?T : Out here.R: O.K.T : He bite my leg.R: What?T : Duck bite my leg.R: The dog bit your leg. Oh, oh, the duck. Oh boy!T : Me go in the water.R: You went in the water ?T : Yeah. My leg.{Interrupted by mother, with discussion of picture painted by child)
438
WHO, WHEN AND WHERE
TABLE 2. Number and average length of narratives*
Sample
i
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
I O
I I
1 2
13
H
•5
16
17
• 8
TotalAvg. lengthMax length
D
2 ' O
55O1
6 0
84-0
44-563695486 1
94 0
36 0
58 2
54656-47S i
778
•36-8887
1 1
8 1
" 56 0
17
S
2
3 0
44-2
53 0
83-683783363673 2
1 1
471 2
511346
I I
3-81 2
7-565 0
1 1
4664 7
12
4 11 2
5 0
1544-5
2 2
T
3732
2 0
447I
5-°37'336-666 085'545'5673S3-844-06S-o36376 2
S6 2
77 06S3
845'5
16
N
83882 8
52-4
447
1 2
381 0
361 2
2 965-883572-586-8
1 2
5°74765'i96-5
1 0
6312
5'5847
1 5 2
4'S15
C
51 0 8
1 0
7795'396 1
1 0
6-816
7 0
IS8786-3
1443
166 1
1 0
6 4137-6
1 0
481 0
6-3735
1 1
481 0
6-5683
1896-5
33
" Average length = average number of utterances.
R: You were telling me about a duck ?T : (Screams :) \R: He bites.T: AndR: And
kick.kick.
He bites.
L
0
0
1
5 01
2 0
94 065-1
43 085573794'4
1 1
6-594784 1863
1 1
971 2
5°78476-8
1 1
1 0 7
1 3 26 1
31
G
86773494'474'5S2874'483 1
838
1 0
341 2
371 2
4654-8
1 1
4 11 1
4384 8
1 1
5596 0
1 0
57
1574'S
1 1
H
53-623 0
0
0
2
3°86 2
54'495 297-4
1 1
4576 1
54-474 266 0
1 1
6454 2
H6-5
1 0
1061 2
69
1 3 06 0
38
P
1 0
4'155 2
1 1
4 0
95348-585687'5
166 1
1 1
471 1
0 - 2
78 187'289586-688-697" 195'4867
15765
23
K
48754 865-842 0
36-644746-574 1
55'2
57655'476 0
53'466 1
777
1 0
4-2
45°74 2
985'4
18
T : Duck bite me and kick and duck kick me and, and bite.
is 439 JCL 17
CHILD LANGUAGE
R:T:R:T:R:
The duckYeah.Yeah?He kickedLike that ?
kicked you and bites ?
that.
T : Yeah, this way. This way.
In the above, the child provides no orientation to where he was (exceptsomewhere where there is water, and clearly not at home), when the eventstook place, or who was there besides himself. The events that took place aredescribed but contextual information is completely lacking. Yet even at thisyoung age, the children at times could and did provide much fullerorientation. For example, the same child at 2:3 produced the following:
T : Look.R: The basement? Did...T : Mommy fall down there.R: Mommy fell down there ? What happened ?T : Happen down there.R: It happened down there.T : She fall on the wood. She fall on the wood.R: She fell on the wood ?T : Yeah. Hurt.R: Yeah?T : I go see.The above narrative left the listener in no doubt as to who the narrative
was about nor where the events took place, even though orientation wasunsophisticated. Time information however was missing.
There was a great deal of variation within each child in terms of length ofnarrative. Table 2 lists the longest narrative produced by each child, and allchildren were capable of producing extended narratives. The variation inlength reflected both how interested in the topic the children were, as well ashow willing they were to talk on any particular day. But in general, as theygot older the children's narratives became longer. Longer narratives tendedto include more orientation, although not necessarily. Following are twoexamples of long narratives, produced by older children. The first is byCathy at 3; 7:
R: Have you ever gotten stung by a bee ?C: But Ian (her brother) got a big sting when he was just first born.R: Ian had a big sting when he was first born ?C: Yeah.R: Well, tell me about it. What happened?C: I was walking with him and, and I just and he failed and he didn't knowthat he failed right on a bee. And he, and his knee was on a bee and stung,he got stung on a bee.
440
WHO, WHEN AND WHERE
R: He got stung on a bee ?C: Uh-huh. And then I was walking another baby, Robert, and you knowwhat?R: What?C: I heard him and me and Robert came running. And you know what ?R: What?C: Paul, Paul Smith came too.R: Paul Smith came too.C: I tried to pick him up but, but he didn't want me to but I had to callmy Mommy.R: You had to call your Mommy, uh-huh ?C: My Daddy and everybody who I knowed who was a grown-up. Andthen everybody who I knowed and who was a grown-up came.R: They all came, uh-huh.C: From my house. And I was walking in the park. They came over afterIan and they wanted, they wanted to see what happened to Ian.R: They wanted to see what happened to Ian? Uh-huh?C: And then I, I told them and I looked down at his knee and there it wasstung.R: And there it was stung. Looked at his knee and there it was stung, uh-huh?C: And I tried to pick him up and he wanted me to pick him up right atthat minute.
The above narrative specifies time, location and participants, although oneis not sure who is encompassed by everybody who I knowed who was a grown-up. In contrast, the following narrative, by Paul at 3 ;8, is very detailed aboutdescribing exactly where various events occurred, but curiously it omits allmention of participants who were necessarily present, as well as timeinformation:
R: Tell me what happened to your chin. That's a big bump. What did youdo?P: I just fell over the trolley bump and I had to go to the Janeway (achildren's hospital).R: You fell over the what ?P: Over the ah...trolley.R: You fell over the trolley?P: Yeah, I'll show you where the trolley is. Here's the trolley.R: You fell over the trolley.P: Yeah, the trolley here, fell over this. I fell over this trolley.R: Uh-huh. And then you bumped your chin and you had to go to theJaneway ? Well, tell me what happened ?P: I get a needle. I get stitches, like, first I got a needle, then I got stitchesand then go home and go sledding.
441 15-2
CHILD LANGUAGE
R: First you got a needle and then you got stitches and then you go homeand go sledding ?P: Yeah.R: Uh-huh.P: When I was better.R: And then you were better.P: Yeah, when I was better.R: When you were better. Ohh.P: They were tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny.R: Were they ?P: Tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny.R: Tiny, tiny what?P: Tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny stitches.
In the above narrative, several other people play necessary roles. Someone,presumably the parent or babysitter, responded to Paul's injury and assessedit as serious enough to go to the hospital and then transported him there. Atthe hospital, a doctor stitched him up. Afterwards, an adult (presumably thesame caretaker) took the child out sledding, which required going somedistance in a car to a local sledding hill. Yet no one but the self is specificallymentioned.
These examples suggest that at both younger as well as older ages, childrenhave the ability to provide at least some orientating context. Following is ananalysis of what types of orientation are provided and how frequently theyare used.
Orientation to WHO the participants are
It is difficult to tell a narrative without mentioning at least one participant;the autobiographical nature of the narratives meant that the most commonlymentioned participant was the self. For all the children, about 40% ofspecified participants were the self at all ages. The other participants wereclassified into the following categories.
(2) INTRODUCED PARTICIPANTS were those individuals who were named andwhose identity was explained, or else participants who were appropriatelyintroduced with the indefinite article a. Examples include: my friendSharlene, a little girl named Elaine - you don't know her, there was a clown, alady at the grocery store.
(2) KNOWN PARTICIPANTS were those the adult listener was familiar with.The majority of these were the child's family members or the babysitter whotook care of them daily. Also included here were neighbouring children orfriends of the child who were known to the researcher. For example, some ofthe subjects frequently played together and knew that the researcher visited
442
WHO, WHEN AND WHERE
all of them, so they would not be expected to explain the identity of the otherswhen they talked about them.
(3) UNFAMILIAR PARTICIPANTS were those who were mentioned with a firstname (I went with Jennifer) without explaining the identity of that person, orwho were mentioned with the without appropriate introduction {the man gaveit to me). The majority of these were first-name-only participants.
(4) INFERRED PARTICIPANTS were instances in which the child used thepronoun we and one could infer the identity of the participants. In mostcases, we meant the family. For example, we went to the circus was inferred tomean the family went, or at school we went to visit the fire station was inferredto mean the preschool class visited it.
(5) CONFUSING PARTICIPANTS were those that could not be decoded. Mostof these were instances in which the child used an unspecified pronoun (Hegave me some candy). Occasionally other participants were confusing, such aswhen an only child talked about playing with her brother.
(6) UNSPECIFIED PARTICIPANTS included instances in which the childomitted mention of participants that were necessarily present. The childrenfrequently specified only themselves as narrative participants, but in many ofthese narratives others had to be present. A two or three-year-old child doesnot go alone to the library or beach, or go fishing in a boat, so if the childmentioned only the self this would be scored as an instance of unspecifiedparticipants.
The author scored all of the narratives for participants, and 15% of thenarratives were scored by a second scorer. Reliability for the above categorieswas 92%. The total number of participants in the children's narratives isfound in Table 3, along with the relative percentage of each category. Themost frequently specified participants were known to the researcher; childrenof this age spend most of their time with their families and, not surprisingly,
T A B L E 3. Number and percentage of participants other than the self
Name
DannySusanToddNathanCathyLisaGaryHelenPaulKelty
Total
120
164
791372 1 31762 0 1
'73197108
Introduced0//a
7958
10
6632
3
Known0//o
4949255254564660
5°38
Unknown/o
2
13
19
78
21
11
7142 0
Inferred%
26
133776
19'5198
Confusing0//o
3541
4442
65
Unspecified/o
1312
442517
7H12
10
26
443
CHILD LANGUAGE
these are the most common participants in their adventures. They seldomprovide unidentified pronouns or other confusing references to participants,but on the other hand they seldom provide fully explicit orientation to non-family participants either. Instances in which the child names a participantand simultaneously explains that person's identity are rare. Also, the childrenfrequently produce narratives in which only the self is mentioned, and inmany they omit people who play an obligatory role in their adventures.
They also frequently use the pronoun we without specifying exactly whois being referred to. We inferred that the nameless we consisted of familymembers but this might not necessarily be so. The children could have goneto various places with the babysitter, friends of the family, or their preschoolclass rather than the family. Two examples will suffice: Paul at 3;o talkedabout going to a restaurant to eat. In this narrative, participants weredescribed with we. But later checking with the mother showed that only partof the family was present (mother and not father), and that there were severalnon-family members present as well. As another example, Cathy at 3;2described going to a parade using we. Later probing disclosed that no familymembers were present at all, merely Elaine whose identity was unknown.Thus, the children are clearly using we in a non-specific way, meaning selfplus other.
The data were searched for developmental changes in each category, andfor the most part the children were doing exactly the same thing at 3;6 asthey were doing at 2; o. It is notable that only two children under 2; 6 provideidentifying information for even a single individual that they name; suchidentification, although still relatively rare, is more common at older ages.However, most of the children either never identified named participants orelse did it no more than once or twice during the entire 18 months of study.
Clearly, competent and fully explicit orientation to narrative participantsis something which is seldom seen in children under 3; 6, and which willundergo considerable improvement with age. This is consistent with previousresearch by both Kernan (1977) and Menig-Peterson & McCabe (1978), whofound that children around 8-9 years of age identified only about half of thenames that they provided, and that younger children did a considerablypoorer job of person orientation.
Orientation to WHEN the events occurred
Although it is almost impossible to tell much of a narrative without includingat least some information about the participants, it is easy to delete any sortof time reference. Thus 'when' information is optional, albeit useful andinformative.
The children provided three different types of orientation to time:
(1) References to the recent past, i.e. within the past 24 hours. Theseincluded yesterday, last night, this morning or today.
444
WHO, WHEN AND WHERE
(2) Conventional time references such as one day, once, before, the otherday. Note that these include no information about how long ago the child isreferring to.
(3) Absolute time references in which the child states how long ago theevent occurred. Examples include last week, last Saturday morning, inSeptember when it was my birthday, when I was a baby, and a long time ago.References to relative time (this happened when I was swimming,.etc.) are notincluded here.
The author scored all instances of' when' orientation, and 15 % were scoredby a second scorer. Reliability was 97%. See Table 4 for ages at which thechildren first spontaneously used the different types of time reference in oursample. This table also includes the number of narratives in which the childcould potentially provide time information. These numbers are lower thanthe total number of narratives produced because a number of initial promptsby the experimenter included time information, such as 'Tell me about whathappened at Christmas.'
TABLE 4. Age and MLU of first 'when' orientation and age of appearance ofeach type
Child
DannySusanToddNathanCathyLisaGaryHelenPaulKelty
Totalnarratives
93119
7 2127
'551 0 2
" 7106
1 2 1
80
First' when'
2J42;32; 11
2;62 ; 2
2;6
z;s2J92;72J4
MLU
3-884-544'495 2 1
3 9 34-525744 8 2
4794 7 5
Yesterday
2 ; 4
3 ; i2; 11
2;62 ; 2
2;6
2152 ; 9
217214
Conventional
2',4
2 : 3
3:52:92;62J92;83',43 ; i
3 ; i
Absolute
3;22; 10
none3;o2;5none3;o3 1 '2 ; 9
2;6
For nine of the ten children, the first reference to time was to the previous24 hours (yesterday, etc.). One child simultaneously used a conventionalreference, and one used a conventional reference first, but for the others therewas a gap of some months between reference to the previous 24 hours andother forms. Different children used different references to the previous day:some exclusively used yesterday, others last night, and so on. Although someof the uses of references to the previous day were accurate, many othersclearly were not; they referred to anything in the past, regardless of how longago. For example, one child stated: Yesterday I went to the zoo, but sincegoing to a zoo required a long trip, probably by airplane (the nearest is athousand miles away), we were quite certain that the visit was not' yesterday'.This is similar to Sachs' (1983) daughter using yestermorning for all past
445
CHILD LANGUAGE
reference. Unfortunately, we were not able to verify whether or not many ofthe experiences had actually occurred within the past 24 hours, so percentageaccuracy of usage could not be assessed. Nevertheless, even if the children areinaccurate, they are still demonstrating a budding sensitivity to the need toembed their narratives within some kind of timeframe.
When references to conventional and absolute time appeared, childrenappeared to develop style differences in terms of which type of reference theypreferred. Three children showed a substantial preference for conventionalreference and one preferred absolute reference, while the others were lesssystematic. We suspect that these preferences reflect the relative frequenciesof these different types of distant past reference in their parents, but in theabsence of parent narrative data this is only speculation.
Initially, the children very rarely included reference to time. They steadilyincreased the rate of inclusion of 'when' orientation during the 18 months inwhich they were studied. See Table 5 for changes in the percentage ofnarratives for which the children provided reference to time. It is notable thateven in the last six months of the study, when the children were more than3 years of age, 'when' orientation was included in only approximately onenarrative in three.
TABLE 5. Percentages of narratives providing any 'when' orientation at6-month intervals
Child
DannySusanToddNathanCathyLisaGaryHelenPaulKelty
Speech samples
1-6
%
530
10
19630
324
7-120//o
II
10
718382812
1916
27
13-18%
2433233140
391660
233>
In perusing the transcripts, we noticed that time reference was totallyabsent initially, but once it began it was generally present in at least onenarrative at almost every successive age. Furthermore, the initial appearanceof time reference seemed to be related to MLU. Seven of the children beganto include time reference within a month of reaching an MLU of 3#s. Thatis, they suddenly began using it either the same month in which this MLUlevel was achieved, or the month before or after. Only one child included
446
WHO, WHEN AND WHERE
orientation to time before this, while the other two children were more thana month later. Since the ages when the children made spontaneous referencesto time varied between 2;2 and 2; 11, this seemed noteworthy. There was atotal of 35 sessions recorded for all of the children before they reached anMLU level of 3.5, and in the 167 narratives produced in these transcripts forwhich the adult neither provided nor prompted time orientation, there wereonly three references to time. For purposes of comparison, the three sessionsafter reaching an MLU of 35 for each of the children were tabulated. Inthese 30 speech samples, there were 203 narratives for which the childrencould potentially provide 'when' information, and they did so for 21 of them(10%).
It is possible that the children were providing time orientation considerablyearlier than we were finding it. This is an omnipresent problem when onemerely samples children's language use rather than recording exhaustively.Nevertheless, the regular presence of spontaneous time orientation in oursample was linked to speech complexity as measured by MLU for most of thechildren.
Orientation to WHERE the events occurred
When telling a narrative, explicit orientation to place is not obligatory andcan frequently be inferred. If the child talks about falling down the stairs, oneassumes that this happened at home (although this may not necessarily betrue). Likewise, sibling fights, spilling food on the floor, being in bed and soon can typically be assumed to take place at home. This is especially so sincechildren of this age spend most of their time there; but not all of their time- they frequently narrate adventures taking place elsewhere.
The children's 'where' orientations were classified into the followingcategories.
(1) There is no orientation to location and it cannot be inferred.
(2) There is some attempt to specify location but it is confused, so thelistener cannot figure it out.
(3) The child provides no location but it can be easily inferred.(4) The child specifies where some of the events took place but does not
say where the rest occurred, i.e. location is partially specified.(5) Child specifies home (at home, downstairs in the furnace room) or
outside - meaning the yard - or uses a demonstrative (right there).(6) The child states that she went to the X - t h e playground, the store,
the library, school, etc. Included here is the inescapable to McDonald's.(7) The child states that she was at someone's house, but only the first
name of that person is provided and the listener is not told who that personis. (/ went to Judy's).
447
CHILD LANGUAGE
(8) The child states that she was at someone's house and the person isidentified. (/ was at my friend Sharlene's. We went to Aunt Paula's.)
(9) A geographical location is provided. (We visited Montreal.)(10) Some other form of full 'where' orientation is provided. Examples
include: At the Arts and Culture Center, there's a pond there. To the BowoffShop, it's a long way. We went for a walk where the blueberries grow, up a bighill. In the pond of Daddy's airport. At the McDonald's on the way home, nearmy house.
The author classified the place orientation of all the narratives, and 15%of them were independently classified by a second rater. The rate ofagreement for the above categories was 93 %.
Table 6 outlines the number of narratives that could potentially include'where' orientation (without adult prompting), as well as the age and MLUof the first reference to place in our samples. Orientation to location occurred
TABLE 6. Age and MLU of first 'where' orientation
Total FirstChild narratives 'where' MLU
DannySusanToddNathanCathyLisaGaryHelenPaulKelty
89119
59106
141
1 0 9
1 1 2
9610876
2;62 , 2
2J42:32 ; 2
2;s2 ; 2
2;72;42:4
3 5 53612 6 23 2 02 9 6
3-433 4 23-243-37371
earlier than orientation to time in seven of the children, and in an additionaltwo children both appeared at the same time. Location is undoubtedly moresalient to children than time since it is concrete and observable; it is alsoeasier to encode linguistically. In six children the first 'where' orientationappeared within the first couple of samples and in the seventh it appeared thefirst time the child produced at least four narratives, so presumbly thechildren could well have been providing such orientation at an earlier age.
The sort of location information that children provide is described inTable 7. For simplicity, the three most complex forms of locative information(categories 8 to 10) were summed, since all were relatively rare. For five ofthe children, their first specified location is their home, and for another fourit is at the X. One of these latter simultanoeusly tells us that he was at anunidentified person's house. This is also the first place information providedby another child. The types of place reference that are last to appear for most
448
WHO, WHEN AND WHERE
TABLE 7. Percentages of different types of 'where' orientation
Child
DannySusanToddNathanCathyLisaGaryHelenPaulKelty
Fullref.0//o
472
I I
42
I I
61 2
0
AtX0//o
91 0
IS2 0
141 1
>3'91 0
2 0
Person'shouse
0//o
380
1
864465
Home%
16
712
81 2
16
716
1 2
1 1
Partial1 where'
0//o
632
6542
2
I
7
Infer' where'
0//o
3944362 0
2 3
3943333°2 6
Confused0//o
0
2
2
I
I
O
O
t
O
3
None0//o
2 3
'932
34332 2
21
>92 9
28
of the children are both orientation to a specified person's house andgeographical location. These are not surprising: since the children seldomattach description of a person's identity when naming participants, theywould not be expected to do so when providing location. In addition,geography is a difficult concept for young children to grasp, and mostreferences to it specified only a global city or province name. The childrenvirtually never identified a specific location within that distant locale, andwere only labelling the endpoint of major trips. These would have beenfrequently rehearsed by parents, who typically before going on a triprepeatedly tell the child, 'We're going to fly to Montreal,' and talk about itin similar terms both during travel to and from that location as well as afterit is over (' We had a nice time in Montreal, didn't we ?'). The only referencesto geography that were more detailed were provided by Paul at 2; 5 {We wentto Nora's Castle. It's up in England in a big town) and by Cathy at 3;o {Wewent to Heart's Delight. We have a summer house there.)
Table 8 shows changes with age in the percentage of the children'snarratives that provide any sort of place information. For most of thechildren, there is steady improvement with age: the children demonstrateincreasing sensitivity to the need to embed their narratives within a context oflocation. The identity of that location, however, makes a difference. Theevents of a narrative can occur either at home or in some other location.Home is where the child is at the time of narration, and where most time isspent. In effect, this is the assumed location of events. On the other hand,locations away from home are varied and highly distinct from each other.From a listener's point of view, narratives about events away from home arethe ones that must specify location for the narrative to be appropriatelyunderstood. To see whether or not the children were sensitive to thisdifference in location, we calculated the percentages of non-home narratives
449
CHILD LANGUAGE
TABLE 8. Changes with age in the percentage of narratives with differenttypes of ' where' orientation
Child
DannySusan
ToddNathanCathy
LisaGaryHelenPaulKelty
Narrativeswith 'where
1-6
%
6332 2
394 0
1738
25274 4
7-12 13-180//o
33383i41434 i32424948
0//o
4430
27504640
37584635
Away-from-homenarratives
1-60//o
0
440
3824335738296 0
1 where
7-120//o
41
573350475260
56565 2
with
13-18
%
62
64
57555440
5570
523 1
At-home narrativeswith 'where'
1-6
/o
I O
17
5°4278
0
2 0
0
2636
7-120//o
292 O
38172 2
24O
3°3338
13-18%
367
1 2
3327392 2
442 0
2 0
for which location is specified at different ages. This is shown in Table 8.Also shown are the percentages of narratives taking place within the home forwhich location is specified rather than having to be inferred. Children aged3; 6 and under are indeed more sensitive to the need to provide location whenthe events take place away from home, and the improvement we see with agein whether or not place is identified is almost exclusively because ofchildren's increasing tendency to identify location when the events describedtook place somewhere besides home. This argues for a growing sensitivity bythe children to the listener's informational needs.
DISCUSSION
Children are relatively poor at providing appropriate orientation about WHOthe participants in their experiences are: for one thing, they often omit allmention of people who were necessarily present. They also frequently use wewithout specifying who else was there besides themselves. In classifying thechildren's use of we, we usually assumed that it referred to the family notbecause of carefulness of reference on the part of the children, but becausechildren of this age are in fact generally taken to places by their family. It isour assumptions about the typical experiences of children that make thispronoun interpretable, not its usage by the children.
In a parallel fashion, it is our knowledge of the children that makes manyof their named references to other people interpretable. The children mostlyprovide only the first names of participants and rarely specify their re-lationship. Even with the minimal knowledge of these children that we had,
450
WHO, WHEN AND WHERE
the act of seeing them repeatedly meant that certain major participants intheir lives were known to us, including siblings, parents' first names, andsome neighbours and0 friends. The children made little effort to provideidentifying information when they named a participant, but the relativelycircumscribed nature of their interactions at this age meant that many timesthe researcher still knew who the children were referring to. Again, this wasnot because of clarity on the part of the children, but rather because offamiliarity with some of the people in their lives on the part of the researcher.Even so, many individuals were unidentifiable. In adult discourse it isunacceptable to overspecify a referent already known to the listener, and thusit is possible that the children's lack of participant specification was due tosome awareness of the listener's knowledge base. However, this is improbablebecause the children were no more likely to identify those participants whoseidentity was unknown to the researcher than ones who were familiar such assiblings or frequent playmates.
In summary, knowledge of who the children were talking about would beavailable to people who are familiar with the typical experiences of the childrenand with the specific people important in these children's lives, but often notto people with little background knowledge. That is, their narratives are notwell adapted to the context-free communication that is so important foreventual communicative competence.
Turning to time orientation, this is at first almost non-existent, althoughafter appearing it shows increasing frequency with age. Although the firsttime references are formula words (usually forms of reference to the previousday like yesterday which are often inaccurate), they nevertheless demonstratethe child's increasing awareness of the necessity of indicating time. Ascommand of conventional and absolute time markers appears, the child'scontinued use of reference to the previous day becomes more accurate, andthus time orientation becomes more differentiated. However, even at theoldest ages the children were spontaneously providing time orientation inonly about a third of their narratives. This accords with the findings ofMenig-Peterson & McCabe (1978), who found that orientation to time wasthe least frequently provided of all the types they studied. Although bothEisenberg (1985) and Miller & Sperry (1988) found instances of timeorientation in the narratives of their very young subjects, both noted it asextremely rare (in Eisenberg's case, in only 3 % of the children's narratives).
Orientation to place is more common in the children's narratives and alsoshowed steady improvement with age. Even at the youngest ages the childrenare specifying location in almost a third of their narratives. Of most interestis the difference between incidence of ' where' information based on locationof the events. When the events take place at home, the presence of specificorientation is variable and there is little change with age; but a quite differentpattern emerges with away-from-home narratives where there is steady age-
CHILD LANGUAGE
related improvement. This could be due to two reasons. One is that thechildren may simply be acquiring the descriptive means or vocabulary to talkabout more locations as they get older. This seems an unlikely explanationsince they are able to specify location in such a large proportion of their away-from-home narratives at the youngest ages, and since there were no suddenacquisitions of any of the specific types of location nor developmentalincreases in any category except possibly FULLY SPECIFIED LOCATION. For thiscategory, the children always had less complete forms of place informationavailable, for example, at the store rather than at the grocery store in Zeller'sMall. An alternative explanation is that the children are showing increasingsensitivity to the need to provide orientation in order for the narrative to bemeaningfully interpreted by the adult. This accords with the large body ofresearch showing that even young children show emergent skill at non-egocentric communication and role-taking skill in simple enough tasks,including narration (e.g. Flavell, 1985). For example, Menig-Peterson (1975)showed that three- to four-year-old children are much more likely to identifyparticipants, locations and objects in their narratives when they are talking toan unknowledgeable adult rather than to the adult who was with them duringthe events that are being described.
An unanswered question is the role of adults in children's growingorientating skill. Previous research has emphasized adults' provision of ascaffold of content within which children can begin to relate their experiences(Sachs, 1983; Eisenberg, 1985; Miller & Sperry, 1988). In these studies,adults initially provided hosts of prompting questions that largely determinedwhat kinds of contributions the children would make to their jointly-produced narratives. As the children gained increasing competence atretelling their experiences the adults decreased their structuring role. Anexample of scaffolded narration is the following, prompted from Danny at 2; 3by his mother upon arrival of the researcher, before leaving the room:
R: Did you get some groceries ?M: Sure we did. We bought, we bought, what did we buy ?C: Nothing.
M: Yes we did. We bought, what did Danny buy with his own money?C: A candy.
M: Candies. And how did you, where did you get candy ?C: Nothing.
M: Come on. How did you get the candy ? What did you do ?C: Nothing.
M: You're bugging me, you're bugging me.C: Give her give a dime.
M: With a dime. What did you do with the dime ?C: Put in candy chine.
452
WHO, WHEN AND WHERE
The above example demonstrates scaffolded interaction, with the child'scontribution determined mostly by the adult. In the present study, wedeliberately did not provide the scaffold that adults typically do, at least whenthey talk about the past with children under 2; 6. It is also true, of course, thatwe did not have the background knowledge necessary to provide the leadingquestions that typically are included in the adult scaffold. The only questionsthat we could ask (and for the most part did not) were general purposeorientating queries of who, what, when, where, and why. Familiar adults, incontrast, typically insert specific prompts for much more information.Previous research suggests that adults routinely provide a scaffold thatspecifies most of the content of narratives for children under 2;o and formany children up to 2;6 or 3;o, and then adults provide a progressivelyreduced scaffold as their children gain more narrative competence. Animplication is that this scaffold is essential for young children to providemeaningful contributions.
One of the most striking findings of this study was the fact that very youngchildren could tell narratives even when little scaffold was provided.Although we did not elicit narratives from children under 2; 1, children at thebeginning of our study were still capable of providing narratives in theabsence of structured prompts. However, their narratives were often difficultto understand because of their lack of orientating context.
The role of the scaffold provided by adults familiar with the child'sexperiences is an important issue. This scaffolding provides a teachingformat that shows the child what should be included in a narrative (Sachs,1983; Eisenberg, 1985; Miller & Sperry, 1988). Of particular importance tous is that adults usually intervene to prompt for orienting information if itis not spontaneously provided, and in fact our personal experience withparents and teachers is that they find prompts for such information difficultto suppress. Adult prompts about context probably teach the child thatcontextual embedding is crucially important. Since omission of orientationpredictably leads to such probes, children increasingly internalize thenecessity of providing orientation as they get older.
The present research did not assess the degree to which adults prompt fororientation in children as young as this, and this is an important avenue forfuture research. In particular, do parents differentially prompt for differenttypes of orientating context, and are these related to the different patternsfound here? Predictions based on the results of this study would be thatparents usually prompt for who (although they do not require morespecification than a first name and seldom object to we), often prompt forwhere and seldom for when. In addition, are there developmental changes inwhat kinds of orientation adults prompt for, and are these related to the kindsof developments found here ?
A related issue is the role of individual and cultural variation. Do parents
453
CHILD LANGUAGE
differ in terms of what kinds of orientation they both prompt for and model ?Social group differences have been found in how much parents prompt formotives and causes (Eisenberg, 1985), and cultural differences about what isimportant in a narrative have also been found (Schieffelin & Eisenberg,1984). Future research should analyse individual differences in parentalscaffolding and the interaction between parental prompts and child skill.
In conclusion, children need to learn that good narratives are composed ofboth evaluative and referential information, and that good reference necessi-tates appropriate embedding within a context. Narratives without contextualorientation are difficult to understand, particularly narratives without thebasic information of who, where and when. The present research foundyoung children to be relatively poor at providing such information spon-taneously, although developmental improvement was noted for when andwhere. Children also need to embed their narratives within more complexcontextual information such as causes and motivations, ongoing behaviouralsituation, mood and circumstance. As children get older, they learn toinclude these more complex forms of orientation. Although children under3;6 have made some progress in the development of orientation skills, theystill have a long way to go.
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