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

Abstract

Non-literal language most often permeates interesting and informative narratives. These are the non-perceptible, inferential aspects of a story, such as the explanation of events, the attribution of internal, particularly mental, states to the characters of the story, or the evaluation of events by the participants and/or the narrator. The main aim of this paper is to examine whether non-literal uses can be promoted in 7-year-old French-speaking children's narratives through the use of a short conversational intervention (SCI) which focuses the children's attention on the causes of events. The results show that, after the SCI, the expression of non-literal aspects, even higher-order ones, may make their appearance or significantly increase in children's stories. The reasons for the effectiveness of the SCI in the promotion of non-literal uses of language and narrative skills in general, as well as the importance of using the SCI as an evaluative instrument, are discussed.

Conversationally and Monologically-Produced Narratives: A Complex Story of Horizontal Décalages

“…It confirms results obtained in earlier studies showing the facilitating role of conversations for the expression of evaluative/inferential components, such as explanations and references to the characters' internal states (e.g., Berman, 2004;Eaton, Collis, & Lewis, 1999;Shiro, 2003). Its presence also provides a strong indication that the improvements found in the SMNs produced after the SCI, found here and in previous studies (Veneziano, 2016(Veneziano, , 2017Veneziano, Albert, & Martin, 2009;Veneziano & Hudelot, 2009;Veneziano & Plumet, 2019), are closely related to what children express during the SCI. Indeed, the improvements in the SMNs occur after the children expressed MREs during the SCI, MREs that for the most part were not expressed earlier in the FMN, and many of which were maintained in the SMN.…”

Individual differences in the effectiveness of a narrative-promoting intervention: Relation with executive function skills

“…Previous studies using the SCI procedure consistently showed that kindergarten and elementary school-age children improved the quality of the narrative produced after their participation in the SCI (e.g. Veneziano, 2016, 2017; Veneziano & Hudelot, 2009), improvements that did not occur in control groups where children produced their second narrative without participating in the SCI (Veneziano et al, 2009, 2020).…”

“…The procedure of the narrative task follows the principles of the SCI procedure used in previous studies (e.g. Veneziano, 2016Veneziano, , 2017Veneziano & Hudelot, 2009;Veneziano & Plumet, 2019;Veneziano et al, , 2020. It is a within-subject design that enables researchers to compare the narratives produced by the same children before and after a short conversational interaction with the experimenter.…”

“…In studies using the SCI procedure (e.g. Veneziano, 2016Veneziano, , 2017Veneziano & Hudelot, 2009;Veneziano et al, , 2020, it was found that after the SCI, children between 5 and 10 years of age told a narrative with more causal and mental content than the narrative they told just before participating in the SCI. This improvement also held for stories narrated one week later (Veneziano et al, 2020).…”

“…The present study is based on previous work showing that children significantly improved the causal and mental content of their narratives after participating in a short narrative-promoting conversational intervention focusing on the causes of story events (e.g. Veneziano, 2016, 2017; Veneziano & Hudelot, 2009; Veneziano & Plumet, 2019; Veneziano et al, 2009, 2020). Alongside the positive effects of the short conversational intervention (SCI) at the group level, individual differences in the extent to which participants improved the quality of their narratives after the SCI were observed.…”