Early talk about the past: the origins of conversational stories of personal experience

Abstract

This paper explores children's early talk about specific distant past events and its development into conversational stories of personal experience, with special focus on its evaluative function. The data consist of longitudinal home observations of five working-class children and their mothers from ages 2;o to 2;6. Results indicate that during this period the children talked primarily about negative past events, especially events of physical harm; the rate of talk about specific past events doubled; temporally-ordered sequences increased dramatically ; and the children became better able to accomplish such talk independently. In addition, one of the most striking findings is the extent to which these 2-year-olds were able to communicate their attitude toward the past event, with speech about the past containing five times more evaluative devices than other speech. These results suggest that (1) by age 2; 6 stories of personal experience emerged in incipient form, and (2) the roots of this genre lie not only in cognitive skills and social interactional support but in the emotional significance of the depicted event.

Talking About the Non-Literal: Internal States and Explanations in Child-Constructed Narratives

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Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

“…In a longitudinal study, P. J. Miller and Sperry (1988) found that 1.5-to 2.5-year-old girls' talk with their mothers about distant past events was primarily about negative events, especially those involving physical harm. A longitudinal case study that examined a child's ability to talk with her mother about the past between 20 and 28 months (Hudson, 1991) revealed that both mother and daughter discussed past negative emotions far more than positive emotions: negative emotions comprised 68% of emotions mentioned by the mother and 76% of those mentioned by the daughter 5 .…”

The Development of Narrative Discourse in French by 5 to 10 Years Old Children: Some Insights from a Conversational Interaction Method

“…Its development spans over a long time, from the beginnings when familiar partners scaffold children's first references to the past (e.g., Miller and Sperry, 1988;Sachs, 1983;Veneziano and Sinclair, 1995) to the first simple narratives of recurrent events and of personal experience (e.g., Nelson, 1999;Peterson and McCabe, 1991), through child-initiated autonomous personal life and fictional narratives whose structural organization and linguistic expression develop through the school years up until adolescence and even adulthood (Berman and Slobin, 1994;Hickmann, 1995;Berman, 2009). Research has shown that, at a given age, narrative competence may vary depending on the content and on the context in which children produce their narratives.…”