Chapter 5 Discussion
5.3 Cultural- and language-specific factors
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Accordingly, to analyze the data, the present study first figured out the interrelationship among events, and then identified the application of linguistic devices. This effective method might be an alternative way to analyze narrative connectivity.
5.3 Cultural- and language-specific factors
A language user may choose language forms by the features of the language. This section will take Mandarin Chinese and English as examples. The most obvious difference between Mandarin Chinese and English is tense; accordingly, the coding scheme of Mandarin Chinese is without tense, while the coding scheme of English is with tense. As for aspectual
expression, temporal connectives, and causal connectives, it was found that the tokens and the forms of these types of linguistic devices increased as the narrators’ age increased (e.g.,
Peterson & McCabe, 1991; Berman & Slobin, 1994).
Although the observed forms of linguistic devices in the present study roughly agree with the devices acquired by the four-year-old children in Hsu’s (1996) study, causal connectives were applied less and aspectual expressions were rarely found in the present study.
Given that Hsu investigated Mandarin-speaking children in Taiwan born before 1996, it is possible that the differences between Hsu’s findings and those in the present study are due to
time or location. Since previous cross-cultural studies have shed light on cultural factors, the
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present study may infer that the narrators living in Mainland China could have a different narrating style from those living in Taiwan.
The present study found that the remaining type—zero connectives—was seldom explored. However, the four-year-old Mandarin-speaking children in the current study applied many zero connectives in relating events, but do children speaking other languages follow the same pattern? Previous researchers have observed a related phenomenon with adults (e.g., Chand & Su, 2012) and with another language (e.g., Peterson & McCabe, 1991). Moreover, if speakers do juxtapose two clauses to convey their causal or temporal relationship for some reason, such as pragmatic intention (as mentioned by Chand & Su, 2012), then how do hearers realize this marker? Further research should be conducted on speakers across ages or across languages, and the analysis could follow the methods and procedures applied or referred to in the present study. To conclude, the present study provided Mandarin Chinese results and evidence under the topic of four-year-old children’s narrative connectivity.
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Chapter 6 Conclusion
This chapter consists of two parts. Section 6.1 summarizes the findings of the present study. Section 6.2 presents the limitations of the present study and suggestions for further research.
6.1 Summary
The present study aimed to investigate Mandarin-speaking four-year-old children’s (1) event connection in narratives, and (2) application of linguistic devices to mark narrative connectivity. The study segmented c-units following segmentation conventions (Loban, 1976;
Strong, 1998), identified whether two events were connected and which types of connections existed between the events following Trabasso and Sperry’s (1985) procedures, analyzed the
connectedness of events adopting Diehl et al.’s (2006) method, and, finally, identified linguistic devices based on a modified coding scheme (Li & Thompson, 1981; Tiee & Lance, 1986; Chang, 2004; Yip & Rimmington, 2004).
Regarding the first research question, results revealed that, generally, there were about 35.89 events in the four-year-old children’s narratives, and each narrative event usually had
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one connection to or from other events. There were also cores in the narratives serving as the main themes of the story. These attributes of the four-year-old children’s narratives contributed to the conclusion that their narratives were primitive. Moreover, among the connected events, motivation and enablement were the most frequently observed types of connections, physical causation was observed less, and psychological causation was observed the least. The four-year-old children showed a poor ability in interpreting others’
psychological states, and they often told their own version of the story instead of telling the story as if they were the naïve protagonists.
Regarding the second research question, pertaining to the connected events, the largest proportion was marked with temporal connectives, followed by zero connectives. Aspectual expressions and causal connectives were less frequently observed. In terms of the applied linguistic devices under various connection types, temporal connectives and zero connectives were found to have been the most frequently used linguistic devices in each of the connection types.
6.2 Limitations and suggestions for future research
Although the findings of the present study—the narrating ability of four-year-old children—are in agreement with earlier researchers’ findings (e.g., Applebee, 1978; Berman
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& Slobin, 1994; Sah, 2013), the results would be more convincing if the study had been longitudinally and cross-linguistically conducted. The developmental differences between the four-year-old children and younger or older children would help clarify the complete picture
of the four-year-old children’s process of language and cognitive development.
In addition, the present study adopted Trabasso and Sperry’s (1985) framework in
identifying connection types between events, and thus the present study was unable to compare the results to those of Wu and Tsai’s (2006) study due to the different coding system.
However, Wu and Tsai’s analysis of children’s explanation types could be a good reference for
further modification of the classification of event connections.
Moreover, as reviewed in Chapter 2, the interpretation of the story and the connections between events might have been influenced by cultural factors (Berman & Slobin, 1994). The present study observed that although the book depicted a boy and a dog that searched for their missing frog and finally found the frog, the outcomes in some narratives were described differently, for example, the missing frog in Story 15 was to be eaten by the protagonist. Was this conclusion interpreted by the narrator because he/she believed that frog meat could be a dish in Chinese food culture? Due to the limited number of samples, the present study was unable to make such a conclusion, but it does establish that this phenomenon could be a direction for further cross-cultural study.
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In terms of the use of linguistic devices, there is also room for improvement and further inquiry. It has been found that speakers juxtapose two clauses to convey their causal or temporal relationship, and listeners do realize this relationship, but how do people consider zero connectives? Do people realize that there is such a device? Does the pattern differ between languages? A cross-linguistic study should be conducted to answer these questions and provide results and evidence.
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