No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Personal narrative is decontextualized talk where individuals recount stories of personal experience about past or future events. As an everyday discursive speech type, narrative potentially invites parents and children to explicitly link together, generalize from, and make inferences about representationsthat is, to engage in higher-order thinking talk (HOTT). Here we ask whether narratives in early parentchild interactions include proportionally more HOTT than other forms of everyday home language. Sixty-four children (31 girls; 36 White, 14 Black, 8 Hispanic, 6 mixed/other race) and their primary caregiver(s), (M income = $61,000) were recorded in 90-minute spontaneous home interactions every 4 months from 14-58 months. Speech was transcribed and coded for narrative and HOTT. We found that parents at all visits and children after 38 months used more HOTT in narrative than non-narrative, and more HOTT than expected by chance. At 38 and 50 months, we examined HOTT in a related but distinct form of decontextualized talk-pretend, or talk during imaginary episodes of interaction-as a control to test whether other forms of decontextualized talk also relate to HOTT. While pretend contained more HOTT than other (non-narrative/non-pretend) talk, it generally contained less HOTT than narrative. Additionally, unlike HOTT during narrative, the amount of HOTT during pretend did not exceed the amount expected by chance, suggesting narrative serves as a particularly rich "breeding ground" for HOTT in parent-child interactions. These findings provide insight into the nature of narrative discourse, and suggest narrative potentially may be used as a lever to increase children's higher-order thinking.

The use of higher-order thinking talk (HOTT), where speakers identify relations between representations (e.g., comparison, causality, abstraction) is examined in the spontaneous language produced by 64 typically developing (TD) and 46 brain-injured children, observed from 14-58 months at home. HOTT is less frequent in lower-income children and children with brain injuries, but effects differed depending on HOTT complexity and type of brain injury. Controlling for income, children with larger and later-occurring cerebrovascular infarcts produce fewer surface (where relations are more perceptual) and structure (where relations are more abstract) HOTT utterances than TD children. In contrast, children with smaller and earlier occurring periventricular lesions produce HOTT at comparable rates to TD children. This suggests that examining HOTT development may be an important tool for understanding the impacts of brain injury in children. Theoretically, these data reveal that both neurological (size and timing of brain injury) and environmental (family income) factors contribute to these skills.