行政院國家科學委員會補助國內專家學者出席國際學術會議報告
2. METHOD 1 Subject
(2) Do 5-year-olds and 9-year-olds tend to interpret a sequence of locally-connected events differently?
2. METHOD 2.1 Subject
Earlier studies showed that 5-year-olds and 9-year-olds display different abilities in constructing and connecting events in the story and in using FOM expressions (Bamberg and Damrad-Frye 1991, Berman and Slobin 1994, Sah 2006, 2007).4 Such difference in narrative ability gains support from research in developmental psychology. Among the prominent studies, Piaget’s framework of cognitive development clearly state that 5-year-olds and 9-ear-olds belong to different developmental stages, i.e., the former belong to the
3 The causal connection here encodes local causality for the event sequence, while the causal structure relates to the overall goal of the story plotline, i.e., searching for the missing frog, is at the global level. In the present work, we focused on the causal connection at the local level of the story organization.
4 We decide to include 5-year-olds as our youngest group, since we assumeEarlier studies have shown that preschoolers display a considerable growth in narrative skills from age 2 to 6 (Bamberg 1987, Chang 1998, 2000, Minami 1996, Peterson and McCabe 1983). Based on the developmental data from a variety of languages, investigators indicated that 5- and 6-year-olds can already produce well-ordered narratives (Bamberg and Damrad-Frye 1991, Minami 1996, Peterson and McCabe 1983,). Peterson and McCabe (1983), in a study of 1124 personal narratives of children, found that, by 6 years of age, most children are able to produce well-organized stories. Thus, we included 5-year-olds as our youngest group with the assumption that they may begin to display ability in relating events in a story.
pre-operational phase, while the latter, operational stage. To further assess the narrative abilities of children of these two age groups and to make the comparisons with finding from earlier work viable, we also consider 5-year-olds and 9-year-olds as our subjects.
Sixty Mandarin-speaking children, thirty 5-year-olds and thirty 9-year-olds, and thirty
adults participated in the present study. All subjects were from similar middle-class socio-economic backgrounds. All the children were normally developing children, with no learning disabilities, or speech or hearing problems.2.2 Material
To control the content of the fictional narratives, we used a story book, containing 24 pictures, entitled Frog, where are you ? (Mayer 1969) as the material to elicit fictional narratives from subjects. This book was chosen not only because it has become a worldwide research tool which renders the cross-linguistic comparisons possible, but also because it is wordless and its structure has been extensively analyzed (Bamberg 1987, Bamberg and Marchman 1990).
The frog story is a typical children’s story with a hero, a problem, a series of actions following the problem, and a happy ending. In addition, its content and context are age-appropriate to preschoolers. The book is suitable to our research goals since it depicts an elaborate series of events which allow the narrator to provide various links among events and to take different perspectives on events.
2.3 Data Collection
Rapport was first established in the observation periods. The interviews were carried out
individually with each subject, and consisted of an initial warm-up conversation followed by a narrative task, which is based the wordless book, Frog, where are you. The subjects were first asked to look through the entire book and then asked to tell a story while looking at thepictures. The entire interviews were audio-taped and subsequently transcribed.
2.4 Data Analysis
In order to verify the accuracy of the transcription, nine transcripts were randomly
selected and were fully transcribed and coded by another native Mandarin Chinese speaker.Cohen’s kappa statistics were used to assess inter-rater reliability. The inter-rater agreement result was 90%.
After the transcriptions were done, qualitative analyses were performed to assess the ways in which the subjects interpreted the events in the story. Our analyses were twofold: global as well as local structure of the story. Regarding the global structure, we consider three components are crucial for interpreting contents of the story as a whole (Labov and Waletzky 1967, Shen 1988, Berman and Slobin 1994). The three components are: the initiating goal, the unfolding part, and the outcome. To make viable the comparison with earlier findings, we adopted Berman and Slobin’s (1994) criteria to score the narrative production:
(1) The initiating goal is considered if the narrator explicitly mentions the boy protagonist’s noticing that the frog is missing.
(2) The unfolding part is scored for explicit mention of searching or calling for the frog.
(3) The outcome is considered is if the frog the boy takes home is explicitly described as the same or as the substitute for the lost pet frog.
Due to the limited scope of the present work, our analyses for the locally-connected events focused on Picture 3, Picture 14 and 15 of the frog story; the former is a complex event and the latter perhaps presents the most difficult challenge, both conceptually and
linguistically. To successfully elaborate Picture 3, a narrator needs to include five components:
1. change of state event (the boy has woken up) 2. temporal location (in the morning, the next morning)
3. inferencing that the protagonist learns something (the boy sees, discovers, realizes):
the plot-advancing elements
4. the state of affairs which is depicted (the jar is empty) or inferred (frog has gotten lost, disappeared, run away)
5. the protagonist’s response – either subsequent action (get out of bed to look for the frog) or affective reaction (feeling surprised, concerned, curious): attendant circumstances or motivation.
As for Pictures 14 and 15, they present a complex chain of events. Picture 14 functions as the background event for what happens in this sequence of events. To begin with, Picture 14 shows the boy-protagonist climbing up on a rock to call for his frog. While the boy is on the rock, he grabs something which he believes are the branches of a tree. In Pictures 15, the branches turn out to be a deer’s antlers. Thus, these two pictures involve a misconception on the boy-protagonist’s part and the consequence that results.5 Given the nature of the interrelatedness in this sequence of events, the narrator is required to provide causal links between the two events by pointing out the misconception of the boy-protagonist in order to show competent verbalization.
Based on the results of Berman and Slobin’s (1994) work and the earlier work on Mandarin-speaking children (Sah 2007), the present study adopted Berman and Slobin’s classification, with minor modifications, to render the cross-linguistic comparisons viable.
Accordingly, subjects’ interpretation of these two pictures may fall into one of four categories:
5 Picture 15 also works as the precursor of Pictures 16 and 17 which reveal the consequences of the boy’s misconception: the deer runs to a cliff with the boy; the dog runs alongside and barks at the deer; the deer throws the boy off the edge of the cliff and the dog also falls off. In other words, the boy’s unintentional act in the initial event of Picture 15 leads to a series of consequences later in Pictures 16 and 17. The inter-connection among these three pictures, though very intriguing, is beyond the scope of the present work. To better focus our discussion, we analyzed only Pictures 14 and 15.
(1) one event; (2) two unrelated events; (3) related events, with the boy’s misconception implied; (4) related events, with the boy’s misconception explicitly mentioned. Causal connection was considered provided if the boy’s misconception was addressed explicitly or implicitly.