Four-year-old’s cognitive state and language preference

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had gone). Given that the subjects’ ages in the present study ranged from four years to four years and eleven months, they had not yet reached the fourth stage of Applebee’s (1978)

model—unfocused chains—wherein four-and-a-half- to five-year-old children present events related directly to each other. However, at this stage children still cannot conceive of an overall plot, and thus the consistency of characters or themes in a story is missing.

In short, the present study examined Mandarin-speaking children’s data and adopted alternative ways to investigate narrative connectivity. The findings of the present study—the narrating ability of four-year-old children—were in agreement with earlier researchers’

findings (e.g., Applebee, 1978; Berman & Slobin, 1994; Sah, 2013). Regardless of whether the children spoke in English or Mandarin Chinese, and which model was adopted in the investigation, four-year-old children’s narrative ability so far appears to be the same.

5.2 Four-year-olds’ cognitive state and language preference

The present study adopted Trabasso and Sperry’s (1985) procedures in identifying causal

relationships among narrative events as earlier researchers (e.g., Diehl et al., 2006; Sah, 2013) did. However, earlier researchers did not further discuss the following types of relations:

motivation, enablement, physical causation, and psychological causation. Regarding causal relations between narrative events, Wu and Tsai (2006) examined various types in the

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explanations of two cases. However, the present study was different from Wu and Tsai’s study in coding scheme, context, and children’s narrating style, and thus it was difficult to carry out further comparisons between the findings of the present study and that of Wu and Tsai’s study.

Generally speaking, the most commonly observed connection types were enablement and motivation in the present study (see Table 6), in that the four-year-old children tended to connect narrative events with enablement and motivation relations. Physical causation

occurred less, and psychological causation occurred the least. Why psychological causation was the least found relation type among narrative events aroused the present study’s curiosity.

Two probable reasons were concluded: first, the protagonists’ psychological state was

relatively less illustrated in the storybook; and second, the preschoolers’ causal concept had just emerged. Based on the second reason, it could be concluded that children may deal with the less demanding concept—temporality—better, and thus temporal connectives were

applied in marking narrative connectivity much more often than causal connectives were.

Recall that in Berman and Slobin’s (1994) study, they indicated that young children were

found to have had no difficulty in recognizing several scenes at the beginning of Frog, Where

Are You? (pictures 1 to 3), but they might have been unable to figure out what happened to the

protagonists in the latter scenes (pictures 14 to 16). The present study observed that the former scene, which depicts the little frog getting out of the jar where the boy kept it while the

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boy and the dog are sleeping, an empty jar, and then the boy and the dog waking up to find that the frog is gone, was elaborated on by almost all of the children. However, the latter scene, which depicts the boy climbing onto a rock and clutching what seems to be the branches of a tree, and then the branches lifting and turning out to be antlers on the head of a deer, was less often and less well elaborated on than the former scene. The results in the present study support Berman and Slobin’s (1994) findings. In sum, a four-year-old child was not expected to comprehend and describe all the cause-and-effect scenes in Frog, Where Are

You?.

The situation in which the children could not master the protagonists’ psychological state was observed in c-unit 12 in Story 8 (see Table 5). Recall that in Story 8, an event depicted in c-unit 12 “(It) went behind the tree” was mentioned much earlier than its exact position in the storyline. The narrator failed to pretend that he/she was naïve of the protagonists’ actions and

his/her own knowledge of the location of the missing frog was formed by his/her point of view. This situation is in agreement with Wu and Tsai’s (2006) findings where preschoolers

younger than five years old were hardly able to figure out that the protagonist’s understanding/mind was different from their own understanding/mind. In other words, their false belief understanding was immature.

In terms of linguistic devices, the most commonly observed type of device in the

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four-year-old children’s narratives was the temporal connective. Moreover, various forms of temporal connectives were observed. The most frequently found forms were ranhou, jiu,

houlai, and their combinations (see Table 7). 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. Contrastively, causal connectives were applied less, whether in terms of forms or tokens. Moreover, aspectual expressions were rarely found.

Another frequently found linguistic device was the zero connectives. Given that the use of zero connectives did not mean that a narrator understood zero connectives, the present study identified the application of linguistic devices after the interrelationship among events was already figured out. Considering that the causal concept had just emerged in the four-year-old children and it was a more demanding concept, temporality encoded in causality was relatively less demanding for the children. Therefore, the present study concludes that the four-year-old children might have recognized zero connectives’ function in marking temporal relations, and they further applied zero connectives to connect events.

Recall that To et al. (2010) indicated that assessing narrative performance via the examination of linguistic devices might not precisely reflect narrators’ competence. Indeed,

sometimes some clauses are juxtaposed to convey their temporal order or causal relationship but the relationship is not marked with explicit devices (Peterson & McCabe, 1991).

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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.