This study compares interactions during joint book reading of 14 Taiwanese and 15 American mother-child pairs from low-income families. All mother-child pairs read the same book, 'The very hungry caterpillar', at home and their interactions were recorded. Taiwanese and American mothers demonstrated both similarities and differences during joint book reading. Taiwanese mothers talked more, gave and requested more information, but requested and received fewer evaluations from their children. These cross-cultural differences reveal that joint book reading is not just for entertainment; instead, it is a means for transmission of moral values and proper conduct as well as for the socialization of appropriate parent-child conversation styles in the Taiwanese and American families studied.

This study explores growth in Chinese children's narrative over a 9-month period. Sixteen children (eight boys, eight girls) living in Taipei, Taiwan, participated in this project. The children were visited in the home at ages 3 years 6 months (3;6), 3;9, 4;0, and 4;3 and were prompted to tell personally experienced narratives at each visit. Three dimensions of the child's narrative skills (narrative structure, evaluation, and temporality) were assessed from an individual growth modeling perspective. The results of this study suggest that Chinese children, generally speaking, include more narrative components, evaluative information, and temporal markers in their narratives over time. However, the growth patterns and rates of change for each child on each narrative measure vary.

This article examines the spiritual communication between medical students and the donated dead body they anatomized, referred to as the silent teacher. Data were obtained from the medical school of Tzu Chi University in Taiwan, where students are required to write a letter to the silent teacher at the end of the semester after they have anatomized the body. The school has collected and published a total of 89 letters from 1996 to 2001. This article content analyzes all the 89 letters published and draws common themes from them. Based on the results of this content analysis, we have developed a model of spiritual communication.

This paper aims to examine to what extent preschool Mandarin Chinese-speaking children can create an autonomous replica play narrative. Twenty-four Taiwanese children, 12 four-year-olds and 12 six-year-olds, participated in this study. The focus of investigation is on the linguistic resources (i.e., temporal and referential devices) the children use to maintain story lines and to mark shifts between types of talk in replica play. Developmental shifts are evident in these children's use of temporal and referential devices to build up a coherent play narrative. The four-year-olds exhibit a great difficulty sustaining their narrative talk, making use of temporal devices, and managing reference in their replica play. The six-year-olds, in comparison, use clearer reference and more temporal and causal connectives, but their ability to achieve autonomy in play narratives is limited. Developmental differences found in this study, in general, accord with crosslinguistic results.

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between Mandarin Chinese-speaking children’s narrative skill in telling personally experienced stories in preschool and their later language and reading ability. Fourteen Mandarin-speaking children, 8 boys and 6 girls, were visited at home when they were 3;6, 7;5, and 10;1. The children were asked to tell personal narratives to the experimenter at 3;6 and 7;5 and to complete word definition, receptive vocabulary, and Chinese reading comprehension tests at 7;5 and 10;1. Two of the children’s stories with the greatest number of narrative clauses were selected and measured using adaptations of the narrative assessment profile developed by McCabe and Bliss (2003). A number of significant positive correlations were observed between the children’s narrative skills and their receptive vocabulary, definition, and reading comprehension abilities. These findings suggest that the children who had good narrative skill in preschool also performed better in reading comprehension and language tasks in primary school. This study shows that the continuous and interrelated relationship between early oral narrative and later language and literacy is evident not only in English-speaking children but also in Mandarin-speaking children. The educational implications for this study are highlighted.