Early talk about the past revisited: affect in working-class and middle-class children's co-narrations

Abstract

This study contributes to our understanding of sociocultural variation in children's early storytelling by comparing co-narrations produced by children and their families from two European-American communities, one working-class and one middle-class. Six children from each community were observed in their homes at 2;6 and 3;0 years of age, yielding a corpus of nearly 400 naturally-occurring co-narrations of past experience. Analyses of generic properties, content, and emotion talk revealed a complex configuration of similarities and differences. Working-class and middle-class families produced co-narrations that were similar in referential/evaluative functions and temporal structure, with a preponderance of positive content. Working-class families produced twice as many co-narrations as their middle-class counterparts, produced more negative emotion talk, and used more dramatic language for conveying negative emotional experience. These findings suggest that (1) differentiation between working-class and middle-class communities in the content of early narratives may occur primarily with respect to negative experience and (2) researchers need to go beyond emotion state terms in order to accurately represent sociocultural variation in personal storytelling.

Identifying Pathways Between Socioeconomic Status and Language Development

“…However, ethnographic research has suggested a rich oral tradition in many low-SES communities (Miller & Sperry 2012). Children from these communities are exposed to and engage in personal storytelling at an early age, thereby developing culture-specific narrative skills (Burger & Miller 1999, Miller et al 2005. There is evidence that children from low-SES homes engaged in more costorytelling in daily life, produced narratives of higher quality, and had better narrative comprehension than their middle-class counterparts (Burger & Miller 1999, Gardner-Neblett et al 2012).…”

“…Children from these communities are exposed to and engage in personal storytelling at an early age, thereby developing culture-specific narrative skills (Burger & Miller 1999, Miller et al 2005. There is evidence that children from low-SES homes engaged in more costorytelling in daily life, produced narratives of higher quality, and had better narrative comprehension than their middle-class counterparts (Burger & Miller 1999, Gardner-Neblett et al 2012). Unfortunately, low-SES children's strength in narrative skills is often underestimated by teachers, because of the mismatch between home cultures and the mainstream method of instruction in schools (Dyson & Genishi 2009).…”

Parents' science talk to their children in Mexican-descent families residing in the USA

“…In contrast to the focus on self-reliance in families from middle-class backgrounds, Miller and her colleagues (Burger & Miller, 1999;Wiley, Rose, Burger, & Miller, 1998) have suggested that European-American families from working-class backgrounds (as defined by education and occupation) focus on developing cooperation in their young children. Similarly, Guatemalan Mayan mothers with fewer years of formal schooling were more collaborative and less directive with their children than mothers with more years of formal schooling while completing a puzzle (Chavajay & Rogoff, 2002).…”

Enacting Stories, Seeing Worlds: Similarities and Differences in the Cross-Cultural Narrative Development of Linguistically Isolated Deaf Children

“…To determine whether the content in homesigned narratives is similar to that of hearing children's narratives, we applied content codes developed by Miller and Sperry [1988; see also Burger & Miller, 1999] to the deaf children's narratives. First, we coded narratives according to valence: positive if the event the narrative described had a positive valence (e.g., an enjoyable or interesting activity, such as receiving a gift, e.g., when David recounts receiving a balloon and pretzel when he went to visit Santa Claus); negative if the event it described had a negative valence (e.g., a physical injury, a scary or upsetting experience, as when the zombies in a movie frightened Qing); odd if the event it described was unusual or strange (e.g., Marvin relates that when he went bowling with his dad, there was a moose head on the wall at the bowling alley); or routine if the event it described was ordinary or habitual (e.g., Qing's mother puts coins in the fare box when they ride the bus, or David's descriptions of breathing exercises at school).…”