1992/10/01 by Carole Peterson, Allyssa McCabe · 3 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Language Development and Disorders #Early Childhood Education and Development #Child and Animal Learning Development
paper · doi:10.1177/014272379201203606
openalex publication_date 1992/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11
Two contrastive studies of personal experience narration in two mother-child pairs are reported. The relationship between patterns of narrative elicitation and the children's developing narrative skill are investigated. Three sets of data were analysed: mother's utterances during mother-child elicitation, children's spontaneously provided contextual orientation in narratives elicited by a neutral researcher when the children were between 27 and 44 months of age, and the overall structure of the children's narratives at age 44 months. The two mothers differed substantially in the kinds of questions they asked: one focused on context (i.e., who, where, when, what and why), while the other emphasized event elaboration (i.e., what happened). The former's child was more likely to spontaneously include contextual orientation but showed less sophisticated plot structure. In contrast, the narratives of the second child showed better structural organization although she spontaneously included less contextual information. These results are discussed in terms of Vygotskian theory.