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On the acquisition of narrative discourse: A study in Portuguese
Journal
of Pragmatics
559
20 (1993) 559-577
North-Holland
On the acquisition of narrative A study in Portuguese
discourse:
Maria Cecilia Perroni * Received April 1989; revised version March 1993
This is a longitudinal, observational study of the development of narrative discourse, based on data from two Brazilian first-born children acquiring Portuguese as their native language. Tape recorded data were collected at weekly intervals from 2;l - 2;6 to 5;l. In the analysis of the children’s free interaction with an adult interlocutor in their home, the types of strategies underlying narrative constructions were identified. The results show that the first proto-narratives begin to manifest themselves from the verbal interaction of the child with an adult, and that the child interweaves real events with fantasy, making use of both linguistic and non-linguistic devices to narrate. A socio-constructivist approach is called on to explain the process of acquisition of narrative discourse. It is suggested that narratives are produced as a result of collaborative interactions between the two partners in actual conversations.
nomine de te Fabula narrator. (Horace, Satires I, i: 69) Mutato
1. Introduction Narrative discourse in children can be considered as one of the richest subjects of investigation in psycholinguistics, not only because of its peculiar discourse structure, but also because of its relation to memory processes. Displaced speech, at it is called by Bloomfield (1933) can be particularly difficult for young children, as it requires the ability to produce and comprehend language in the absence of contextual support from the here and now. The growing interest in the study of narrative discourse development in children is due to the influence of linguistic theories that consider larger and more complex units of analysis. In spite of this, the question of how children acquire the ability to narrate has hardly been touched, as the first analyses of * Correspondence to: M.C. Perroni, 6045, Campinas, S.P. 13081, Brazil. 0378-2166/93/$06.00
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1993 -
Departamento
de Lingiiistica,
Elsevier Science Publishers
IEL, Unicamp,
B.V. All rights reserved
Caixa Postal
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narratives produced by children at various stages of linguistic development tended to concentrate only on the formal structure of narratives (cf. Kernan, 1977; Clancy, 1980; Peterson et al., 1983). In her analysis of data collected among 60 Japanese children aged 3;8 to 7;4, Clancy (1980) did not succeed in identifying developmental stages, nor in finding an explanation for how narratives can develop. According to her, there is a lack of longitudinal studies that could produce information on how children develop narrative discourse. Peterson et al. (1983) have tried to provide a structured description for their data, collected among 96 American children aged 3;6 to 9;6, but again, the three systems they used in their analysis could not account for the acquisition of this type of discourse. In fact, the great majority of the first attempts to describe and explain narrative discourse development in children’s data have tended to use linguistic theories that were created to analyze adult narratives - some focusing on syntax, some on semantics ~ in which the units of analysis are still either the sentence or the utterance. In so doing, these approaches tend to look at children’s narratives negatively, i.e., considering what is lacking in them, from the adult’s point of view.l In the present paper, I intend to make a more positive contribution to the study of narrative discourse development in children. My purpose is not to describe the final product, but rather, to describe and try to explain the very process of development of this type of discourse. In order to do so, I will use an approach to child language development in which the unit of analysis is the dialogue between the child and an adult. Since the early 1970’s, several criticisms of sentence-centered theories in language acquisition have emerged, some arguing that the child’s linguistic constructions cannot be fully understood outside the context of his/her linguistic interaction. But again, if we restrict ourselves exclusively to the crucial role of context (as was typical of the first pragmatic approaches to language acquisition), we will not be able to realize the progress that can be made if the child’s and the adult’s productions are considered jointly, rather than separately. In fact, nowadays there is growing agreement in the field about the limitations of those analyses that abstract the child’s productions from those of the adult partner in conversations. The role of the two participants in any communicative exchange was first taken into account in language acquisition studies in the 1970’s (e.g. Dore, 1979; Scollon, 1979) when some researchers tried to show the central place of the interaction with other, more mature members of the culture. According to this view, the child can learn by sharing with his/her interlocutor in the intersubjective construction of meaning (Wells, 1980: 46). It is also claimed (de Lemos, 1981) that social interaction and language development are interdependent processes that 1 See, for instance, the expression ‘lack a point’ in Kernan and impoverished narratives in Peterson et al. (1983).
(1977) and the notion
of disoriented
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should not be separated in any analysis, psycholinguistic or otherwise. According to de Lemos, in the early phases, language is acquired in the interaction between child and adult through specific dialogue processes that can explain the joint construction of communicative units. The roots of this view can be traced back to the work of Bruner (1975) who considered the acquisition of language as an inter-individual process, which requires interaction schemes between the child and the basic adult interlocutor in the prelinguistic period. This shift of interest in language acquisition studies towards a special emphasis on dialogue as the immediate and primary context for acquisition has proved worthy of further exploration. The task has been undertaken by those who share a socio-constructivist approach to language development and are influenced by Vygotsky’s view on language and cognitive processes. Among those who first analyzed children’s narratives, Watson-Gegeo and Boggs (1977) were an exception to the attempt to use classical linguistic theories to explain child language. Starting with no specific linguistic theory in mind to describe their data, they managed to show that their subjects (between 5;0 and 7;0 years old) were able to produce long and complex narratives in special circumstances of group interaction. These authors recognized the necessity of considering the situation of communication, as well as the role of specific texts which were used as models in the production of narratives. Although they have not analyzed the actual process of development of this type of discourse, they have made a contribution by showing how children learn though interaction. The same applies to Heath’s (1983) analysis of the differences in adult story-telling activities in two different American communities and the way that these affected the competence in narrative discourse developed by children.
2. Methodology 2.1. Subjects
The subjects were two Brazilian first-born girls, Natalia (N) and Daniela (D), from middle-class families, who lived in a monolingual environment and were acquiring Portuguese as their native language. Their parents all had university degrees, and three of them worked as university teachers. Both children were brought up in the home with their parents, although they also attended nursery school for four hours a day, beginning at age 3;0. Natalia was an only child until the end of the data collection - when the children were 5;l - and Daniela has had a sister since she was 2;0.
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2.2. Data collection Data were collected at weekly intervals from 2;1 to 5;l for Natalia, and from 2;6 to 5;l for Daniela. Data were collected at their homes by tape recording the spontaneous conversations between an adult (generally the mother) and the child. The two mothers had been studying language acquisition for some time, but during the sessions they tried to behave as naturally as possible with their children. During this phase of data collection, no particular aspect of language acquisition had been identified; consequently, no special attempts were made to control the productions of the children. In this longitudinal study, 114 hours of interaction in 196 sessions have been transcribed and analyzed. The tape recording of Daniela’s data amounts to 52 hours (104 sessions of 30 to 45 minutes each), with 62 hours in Natalia’s case (92 sessions of 30 to 45 minutes each). Given the fact that initially (at age 2;O) the two children were unable to produce proper narratives (cf. results and discussion), I decided to select all that was produced by the two participants -- adult and child ~ in narrative ‘contexts’. These were quite specific situations when the children were either looking at books and pretending to tell a story or trying to relate what had happened at some time (hours or days) before the session. All the instances of attempts to narrate in which the child participated in at least one turn were selected. As described in the following pages, this study deals with incompleteness, fragments, and poor attempts to narrate, if compared to adult narratives. However deviant, the children’s mistakes and incompleteness can nevertheless be seen as a very good source of information on the process of the acquisition of narrative discourse.
3. Discussion The analysis of narrative discourse in the language of these children starts with the observation of their first attempts to construct and/or report events occurring at a time prior to the time of utterance, as well as the first attempts to tell imaginary stories, Therefore, the study is not limited to narratives of personal experience, as defined by Labov (1972: 360) as: “one method of recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which actually occurred”. There are two principal reasons favoring the inclusion of stories in the analysis: both stories and personal narratives share the same typical formal features, as well as a role in the development of this type of discourse (cf. discussion on phase 2). In fact, temporal dependency between at least two events has traditionally been pointed out as the main characteristic of narratives, and this feature is obviously present in stories as well.
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3.1. First proto-narratives
Up to approximately three years of age, what was found in these children’s productions cannot be considered to be true narratives, if we stick to Labov’s definition. They are, rather, precursors to narratives. In this proto-narrative phase, the few utterances or parts of utterances in which the child refers to some detail of a past event seem to play a preparatory role for the emergence of true narratives. These are in a sense embryonic structures of narrative discourse, and they were constructed within a ‘telling game’, a kind of dialogue in which both adult and child take turns in an alternating pattern. In this ‘telling game’, the role and turns of the participating members are apparently rule-governed in a fashion similar to that form of dialogue identified by Ninio and Bruner (1978). At this phase, both children engaged in role playing and turn taking. As far as narrative discourse is concerned, initially the adult is by far the more skilled participant, and the situation clearly reflects his/her linguistic and cognitive superiority in relation to the child. Attempts to narrate are constructed as a collaborative activity; they are the result of a joint construction, which receives contributions from both participants. In fact, the adult frequently takes the initiative and elicits narratives from the child by directing quite specific questions, which require the development of a strategy of filling in the blanks. The questions are introduced by the adult in a suprisingly predictable order: they are the WH questions: WHERE - used to ask for the spatial location of the event evoked, e.g.: Where did you go yesterday with Granny? (ii) WHO, WITH WHOM, or WHAT - used to ask for the introduction of characters, human or non-human, characterized as subjects of the situation evoked, e.g.: Who was there? With whom did you go? What did you see there? (iii) WHAT plus verbs of action - used to ask about the action, or main event to be recalled, e.g.: What happened there? What did you do there?
(i)
It is interesting to note that in the data for both children the subsequent question in the order above was only added by the adult if a response to the previous one had been given by the child. The fact that these questions are made explicit in the speech of the adults can be related to Labov’s (1972 : 370) suggestion that narratives can also be seen as the result of a series of underlying questions, each one introducing narrative sections. Who?, When?, What? and Where? would introduce the orientation; questions like “Well, then what happened?” would introduce a complication section, and so on. In the children’s data, the first two types of questions can be said to help prepare for that which will eventually
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serve as the orientation of the narrative, while questions of the third type will contribute to the development of the complication, in Labov’s terms. The utterance fragments which the children offered in response to such elicitations by the adults consisted, in the great majority of cases, of references to entities which in some way could be related to the children’s own recent past experience being recalled. This seemed to accomplish the task imposed by the adult partner satisfactorily, as in (1): (1) (N. IV. 2;3) 1. M: Aonde voc2 ganhou este violdo? (Where did you get this guitar?) 2. N: Na feira, assim! (At the market, like that!) 3. M: Quem deu para vote? (Who gave (it) to you?) 4. N: A mamae! (Mummy!) 5. M: Ah, conta o que mais vod viu na feira. (Ah, tell what else you saw at the market) 6. N: Otu usinho! 6i esse aqui no marelinho . .. (‘Nother bear! Look at this yellow one . ..) 7. M: Conta o que vod viu na feira. Batata . . . (Tell what you saw at the market. Potatoes . ..) 8. N : Batata, came, cebola . . (Potatoes, meat, onions . ..) In proto-narratives, the child responds to adult questions by contributing short utterances, sometimes containing verbs inflected in the perfect tense. Yet, these are not true narrative, for they do not meet the temporal dependency criterion. This elicitation of narratives by the adult provides an excellent opportunity for the child to learn how to narrate, since it stimulates the detachment of the ‘here and now’. In a sense, the adults are offering their children a model for narratives, and in this type of linguistic interaction, attention is focused on the code itself. Indeed, the children do not seem to be concerned about the truth of the information content of the narratives they are constructing. In the data for this initial phase, parents were usually seen trying to make the children produce narratives about shared experiences, which means that they knew in advance what had to be told. In fact, there seems to be no other point in making the child tell what happened yesterday, when you already know, and there is no one else present to whom it could be informative. In this phase, then, little can be said about the information content of these jointly-constructed protonarratives.
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It should also be noted that during this phase I did not find adult questions containing items such as when, what day, for how long and others that might require the location of the narrated events on a temporal axis, and which would require the control of complex temporal concepts on the part of the child. In the data for Daniela, there are a few adult elicitations containing temporal elements as such,2 although these questions did not produce the intended effect. Indeed, the child’s responses to them showed an avoidance reaction characterized either by (a) failing to answer, (b) changing the topic of conversation, or (c) inserting now, the only lexical item used by the subject to express temporal relationships. Apart from these proto-narratives, some spontaneous attempts to narrate started to appear in the data for the two children at about 2;6, but only in response to adult elicitation were the subjects gradually able to relate more complex information. In the first spontaneous proto-narratives, the children only mentioned a single past event (or part of it), without relating it to another events, as in (2): (2) (N. X. 2;7) 1. M : Qued2 seu pai? (Where’s Daddy?) 2. N: Ta la! *.* de noite . . . peguei seu livro! (Over there! (she looks towards her father, seated nearby) . . . at night . . . I took your book‘) In (2) the child seems to recall something she did with one of Daddy’s books one night, but she still cannot narrate the whole event without the adult’s contribution. The tendency to recall a single aspect of a past experience can also be seen in Daniela’s data for the same period. In (3), for instance, although the adults requested that she tell about a trip they had taken a few days earlier, she only mentioned that she went on a boat. Once again, the fact that the adults did not continue asking her to tell about what had happened must have had some influence on her abandoning any further efforts to recall the whole episode. (3) (D. VII. 2;9) 1. F: Vamos ver se vod sabe contar. (Let’s see if you can tell me a story. (Father wanted her to tell about a trip they had taken together.))
* There were only five instances at all in Natalia’s data.
of when questions
in the data before 4;0 years of age, and none
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2. M: A Daniela conta. (Daniela will tell you.) 3. D: Entlo . . . e . . . andei de barquinho ! (Then . . . and . . . I went on the boat!) (They go back to talking about the present
situation)
Even in contexts where this type of discourse could be expected to appear, the absence of narratives can be seen to be due to the lack of elicitation on the part of the adult who is present. This was clearly noticed when one of the children at 3;2 was looking at one of the books which were frequently used for story telling, but instead of telling the story, she limited herself to naming the entities present in the illustrations, just as she used to do in a previous naming game phase (cf. Ninio and Bruner, 1978). When Natalia was 2;5, embryonic narrative constructions of imaginary stories began to appear in her data. Similarly, when Daniela was 2;6, she could contribute to the telling of a story with the adult. These proto-narratives, like the ones of personal experience, were also constructed in conjunction with the adult, by means of the same WH questions. The parents not only elicited stories from their children, but from the beginning of the recording sessions they frequently told them classical stories, such as Cinderella, as well as some that belonged to the family’s repertoire of imaginary stories. In Natalia’s data for example, a tale called ‘The Talking Cricket’, invented and frequently told by her mother, played an important role in the narratives she created. Both kinds of stories share common features: the narrator never participates as a character in the plot, non-human beings can act as if they were human, and there is always a fixed plot. In this phase, then, the children are exposed to two distinct and still unrelated means of access to narrative discourse structure: (a) the ‘telling game’, an analytic process in which a previous experience must be recalled, and (b) the stories the adults tell their children, in which the same fixed plot is constantly repeated. Once the adult encourages the children to tell stories, he/she starts to reproduce and analyze the syntactic and semantic structure of the ready-made texts with which he/she is so familiar. The ability to order events in utterances, a necessary condition for narratives, owes a great deal to the numerous rehearsals of these make-believe narratives. The so-called stories that the child tells are advantageous for two reasons: they provide the young child with an opportunity to stick to a fixed plot, while simultaneously freeing him/her from the pressures of the ‘real world’. In fact, it seems difficult to prove a clear separation of fact and fiction in young children. According to Applebee (1978) for instance, children up to 6;0 tend to accept everything as real. For a child, the first interpretation of what a story is is that it is something that happened in the past.
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3.2. A primitive narrative technique
Gradually both children managed to participate more and more in the construction of narratives, especially in terms of quantity. After 3;0, they contributed more by ordering two events in the same utterance. Moreover, spontaneous attempts to narrate non-shared experience ceased to be so rare. Both children started to go to nursery school when they were 3;0, and from that time on they obviously started to have more experiences that were not shared by the parents. But this does not mean that they suddenly started telling the parents complete narratives of what had happened at school. After 3;0, however, attempts to narrate became more frequent and extensive, although the children’s constructions cannot be easily interpreted in terms of content. Some strange narratives began to appear, and one could easily label them ‘nonsense’ at first sight. However, it was possible to identify the use of a primitive narrative technique of the children in these utterances. When asked to tell what happened, their technique for producing more and longer narrative clauses seemed to be based on two devices: one exclusively linguistic, and the other non-linguistic. The linguistic device used in the construction of narratives was the coordination of sentences with specific lexical items: after (wards), (and) then, so. These items have been called ‘narrative operators’ (cf. Perroni, 1983) because they are abundantly used by children to make narratives longer: that is, they are used to link events in clauses. As a consequence, the children managed to produce more, even though a causal relationship cannot be said to exist. In order to satisfy the task of narrating in this phase, the children seem to fill in a narrative framework only formally, with little concern for the content of the episode. Indeed, this is the most plausible explanation for the emergence of ‘nonsense’ narratives such as (4). The use of such narrative operators is found in the data for both of the children after they were about 2;6. Whenever a narrative was to be produced, after, and, then, or so were present, even if there were no two events to be linked, as in (3). At this phase, the children were able to contribute more to the production of a narrative, either making use of a narrative operator to connect events of any kind together, or using the present to recover the past as in (4) and (5). They seemed to be aware that they were supposed to relate events temporally and inflect the verbs in their utterances in the past tense. They started doing this formally, but sometimes contradictions were found in the way they related events, as in (4): (4) (the child seems to invent a narrative) (N. XXVI. 3;2) 1. N: Onte tisti . . eu fui co . . co . . . co biluli na mao, eu nao comia mais, porque eu nao queria. (Yesterday I watched . . . I went with . . . with . . . with the sandwich in my hand, I didn’t eat it, because I didn’t want to.)
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2. M: Aonde que vod foi corn o biluli na mao? (Where did you go holding the sandwich in your hands?) 3. N: Aonde . . . eu joguei fora la na rua! (Where . . . I threw it away, in the street!) 4. F: Mas onde? (But where?) 5. M: Na rua. (In the road.) 6. F: Mas onde vote foi? (But where did you go?) 7. N: Eu fui no Bais. (I went to the market.) 8. F: Corn quem que voci foi? (With whom did you go?) 9. N: Sozinha. (On my own.) 10. M: E vod atravessou a rua sozinha? (And did you cross the road on your own?) 11. N.: Nao! (No !) .. (They talk about a yoghurt they are having.) 12. M: E dai, coma e que voc& voltou para casa? (And then, how did you get back home?) 13. N: De onibus. (By bus.) 14. F: Ahn . . . (Eh __.) 15. N : Aquela casa . . bem malelo. Igual daquele pano la, que ta na melancia. (That house . . . very yellow. The same as the cloth over there, which is on the watermelon.) 16. M : Papel! I? amarelo mesmo! ((surprised) It’s paper. It really is yellow.) 17. N: . . . aquela casa, bem igual da camisa do papai! (.. . that house, just like Daddy’s shirt!) 18. M: Aonde que i: essa casa? (Where is that house?) 19. N: La longe. Fui de Bnibus. (Far away. I went by bus.) 20. M: Ahn . (Oh!) 2 1. N : Agora que eu fui la no . . na minha casa, eu Go voltei aqui. (Now that I went there to . . . to my house, I didn’t come back here.)
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22. M: Nao? (You haven?t?) 23. N: Nao. (No. (I haven’t.)) In (4) the child tries to invent a narrative about a supposed past experience of going to the market on her own and throwing away a sandwich she was holding. However, the adults knew that it could not really have happened, so they started to ask her for more details (cf. (4) turns 2, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 18). The child seems to have made an effort to respond adequately, but in turn 21 she ended up by relating two events without regard to any plausibility of what was narrated: “Now that I went there to my house, I didn’t come back here”. Note that in this turn she manages to satisfy the main condition for a narrative, as she temporally.relates two events using verbs of action inflected in the past tense. The narrative is difficult, if not impossible, to interpret logically, because it lacks coherence and plausibility. There are as yet no precise restrictions as to the semantic nature of the events that are related in a plot. Although (4) can be seen to be an exercise at narrating on the part of the child, it is not difficult to see why the adults did not take it seriously and did not encourage it with further questions about the episode. The non-linguistic device present in this phase consisted of the insertion of aspects of the present situation into the child’s narratives. The procedure for the extension of narratives consisted of the insertion of either personal experiences occurring in the immediate interactional situation (e.g. the activities being engaged in at that moment), or of physical objects which were present. The children seemed to be using any aspect of the present that could be related in some way to the past experience being recalled as a means of retrieving the past. Physical objects, for example, were used as clues to recover distant and absent things by means of present and immediate things. In (4) this can be seen in turn 15, when the child compared the house she was talking about to the cloth covering the watermelon, which was present, and to the shirt Daddy was wearing, because all were yellow. The same device can also be seen in (5): (5) (N. XXXVI. 3;5) 1. M : VocC foi fazer exame de sangue ontem? (Did you have a blood test yesterday?) 2. N: Fui. (Yes.) 3. M: E que aconteceu la? (And what happened there?) 4. N. Eu fui . . . chorar la. (I went . . . to cry there.)
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M: Voci foi chorar la? (You went to cry there?) N: Fui. (Yes.) M: Como que o medico fez o exame para vote? (How did the doctor do the exam for you?) N: Foi, foi fazer o exame de, exame de sangue de, de, de tesoura. (He did the exam of, the exam of blood with, with, with scissors.) M: Nao, nao i: de tesoura. Uma agulhinha no braqo. Uma agulhinha que cutucou o braGo, Go foi? (No, it wasn’t with scissors. A little needle in your arm. A little needle that pricked your arm, wasn’t it?) N: Foi. (Yes.) M: Agulhinha cutucou o braGo e dai fez exame de sangue, ne? E que o medico falou para vote? (Little needle pricked your arm and then you had your blood test, wasn’t it? And what did the doctor tell you?) N: Falou que . . . que essa caixa de anel faz, faz a gente lembra. (He said that . . . that this box of rings makes, makes one remember.) M: Faz a gente lembri? (Makes one remember?) N: I?. Que a gente faz exame de sangue. (Yes. That we have a blood exam.) M: A, t? (Really?) N: kes.) M: Como que essa caixa faz vocC lembrar? (How can this box make you remember?) N: A, ela lembra assim mesmo. (Oh, it reminds me anyway.) M: Hum . . . (Oh . ..)
In (5), the adult still elicits a narrative about a shared experience from the child, suggesting in advance the situation to be recalled: the blood test (cf. turn l).” The mother keeps asking more questions, and in turns 8 and 12, the child mentions scissors and a box of rings. This can only be interpreted as an insertion of the present situation into the narrative. In fact, the box of rings 3 The child had had a blood test some days before. The mother was present all the time, which means that she knew what had happened. No one else was present at the time of the tape recording.
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mentioned was a little box in which her mother kept her costume jewellery, and with which the child had been playing during, the session. Although it may seem to be nonsense, it is not impossible to understand why the child chose it to recall the past experience of the blood test, instead of some other object visible at the time of interaction. The box of rings was related to the past experience narrated by the child, because it contained sharp objects, such as pins and a small pair of scissors, which can easily remind one of the needles that are used in blood tests. This use of the immediate context to recover the absent and distant was significantly made explicit by the child narrator in turn 12: “this box of rings makes one remember”. It is also important to notice that in (5) the child satisfies the task of narrating by filling in a narrative framework only formally, without regard for the factual content of the episode. In turn 12, her response utterance is semantically unrelated to what the doctor said (as requested in the adult’s question), but the child fills in the response. This ‘filling in’ is; however, characterized by the lack of a semantic link between the events or actions mentioned and the characters associated with them. What the child does is to ascribe to one of the characters, the doctor, a comment which is in reality hers. In this phase of somewhat unusual narratives that interweave real events with fantasy, the child starts to combine stories with narratives of personal experience. By mixing these two types of production, it is possible to expand a narrative quantitatively. Evidence for the insertion of personal experiences occurring in the immediate situation, as well as the use of a story framework, can be found in the great majority of the children’s narratives until approximately 4;0. All the strange creations exhibiting the use of at least one of these two devices were analyzed. The inspiration of a familiar narrative helped Natalia to create (6) for example: (6) (N. XxX1X. 3;6) 1. F: 8, eu ache que vote vai la, tomar banho. Se vote nao contar uma estoria pra mim, voc& vai tomar banho. (OK. I think you are going to take a bath. If you don’t tell me a story, you are going to take a bath.) 2. N: Eu ja conto uma estoria pro ce. Da girafa. (I’m going to tell you a story. Of the giraffe.) 3. F: Entao conta. (Then tell it.) 4. N: Onti, a girafa foi na casa dela, soveu muito, ela fez coca e . . . a mae dela falou assim pra girafa: “Nao vai na chuva! Nao vai na chuva!” Ela foi. Entao moreeeu. Ela ficou, ela ficou que nem zacare, Go queria tomar banho, entao ficou - zacale, de ca, de, de zacale. (Yesterday, the giraffe went home, it rained a lot, she made dodo and her mother told her: “Don’t go out in the rain! Don’t go out in the
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rain!” She went out. Then she died. She became, she became like an alligator, she didn’t want to take a bath, then she became - alligator, with scales . . . of alligator.) Casca na perna, ni? (With scales on her legs, isn’t it?) fi. (Yes.) Mas Natalia Go vai ficar de jacark, nl? (But Natalia is not going to become an alligator, is she?) 8. EntBo, a mge dela bateu nela, ela acordou. Ela, ela, ela chorou, bateu nela. EnGo ela foi na casa dela, mostrou 15. Entao ela falou assim pra m8e dela: “Pbtistu! Pbtistu!” (Yes. Then her mother beat her, she woke up. She, she, she cried, she beat her. Then she went home, she showed there [unclear in Portuguese]. Then, she told her mother: (in a very low voice) “P&istu! Pbtistu!“) Daqui eu tiro pra vod. (Let me take this off for you. (about the immediate context)) Cab6ooooo! (That’s all!)
Here the child is only transporting the story frame of the talking cricket tale, which her mother used to tell her almost every night at that period, to the story of the giraffe. In that famous tale, the talking cricket had disobeyed his mother, and had gone barefoot in the rain (cf. turn 4), although his mother had warned him: “Don’t go out in the rain!“. As for the use of the present situation in (6), the child’s inspiration comes from her own experience at the time of the interaction: she didn’t want to take a bath, and when asked to tell a story, she invented the narrative of the giraffe who “didn’t want to take a bath” (cf. turn 4). In addition, the same thing happens in the child’s attempts at elaborating reported speech forms in this phase. In all of her narratives, the characters are still presented as if they had no identity independent of the discourse in which they are inserted. Constructions with verbs of saying may show this, as in (5), turn 12, and in (6), turns 4 and 8. Again in (6), the quoted speech in turn 4 is identical to that frequently used by the child’s mother when telling the cricket tale. The child is then incorporating classic quoted speeches into her narratives. In fact, Daniela made no ceremony of inserting familiar quotes in her narratives, such as “Call the guards”, “Cut her head off!“, “Why such big eyes?“. It seems plausible to suggest that the first usages of quoted speech arise as fillers of grammatical positions created in utterances with verbs of saying, which favor the use of the mechanism of formal construction of a citation as such. The task of giving voice to characters in narratives seems to arise, therefore, as subsequent to the
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grammatical marking of citation. The child’s incorporation of the mother’s construction in the same context is evident, especially when one considers her attempt to construct quoted speech in turn 8. There, she marks through intonation the grammatical position of a quotation, but only succeeds in inserting an odd lexical item in a very low voice: “Potistu!“. In fact, there is no such word or expression in Portuguese, but the child is marking the proper place of a quote in the narrative. The child’s inspiration for applying the framework of the talking cricket tale to her narrative seems to be evidence for Mandler’s assumption that “... story schemata are acquired through the experience with listening to stories”, and that “... children not only use familiar story schemata, but depend on them to organize recall even more than do adults” (1978: 17). Furthermore, the early concepts of story schemata and of macro-structures, as proposed by Kintsch and Van Dijk (1975) can be compared to Labov and Waletsky’s (1966) proposal of the organization of narratives in sections, in the sense that both emphasize the highly organized structure of narratives. Although children’s proto-narratives cannot be said to show a similar complex organization, such concepts can be useful in analyzing children’s acquisition of adult narrative discourse. In the early phases, children start to identify the underlying structure of this type of discourse in the stories adults tell them, or make them (re)tell. As soon as they can break stories down, they start using the formal markers in the production of their own narratives. My data seem to provide evidence for claiming that stories also play a role in the development of narrative discourse in children, since they provide a narrative framework for the relation of singular events. 4 In these early phases, the underlying notion of a narrative seemed to be nothing more than a special type of discourse in which any two events are linked with after, and, then, or so, and where there are verbs of action/activity inflected in the past tense. 5 Once having abstracted the framework for this type of discourse, the children went ahead and developed devices for filling in the spaces in the same way. They did so either by inserting elements of the present situation, collagelike, in their narratives, or by freely combining random events or actions, ascribing a status of past reality to them and inflecting the verbs in the past tense. Sometimes they even invented new lexical items to fill in grammatical positions, as in (6). The creation of odd lexical items in narratives was characteristic of both children’s constructions during this phase. They tended 4 Peterson et al. (1983) were also conscious of the role of classical stories as a standard for setting a pattern. Although their definition of narratives precluded total inventions, they could see a clear connection between narrative and fiction (1983: 196). They suggest that: “the structure of personal narratives is probably formed by the stories to which we are exposed” (ibid.: 208). 5 Although I have concentrated here on some recent work by linguists, I should mention that the views of some literary theorists on the nature of narrative discourse can also be useful in interpreting my data. This is explored elsewhere (cf. Perroni, 1983).
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to combine smaller units such as phonemes and morphemes to form new words that are not actual Portuguese words, i.e. words not found in the adult system. As I have been trying to show here, this creative combination of units was not limited to the production of words; at the same time the two children combined larger units such as clauses to produce a narrative text. Undoubtedly, in this phase both children could deal with language as an object upon which one acts. Even after age 4;0, some difficult-to-interpret narratives such as the ones discussed here can still be found .6 Nevertheless, the narratives of both children gradually improved, and more and more sophisticated and adult-like texts were created. Both children became active in the construction of narratives, taking the initiative, and assuming the role of narrator. They spontaneously narrated non-shared experiences, which were often genuinely informative. At around 4;6, the adult’s role in narrative constructions was no longer clearly directive. No longer were typical WH questions asked so frequently, because the child herself initiated narratives providing the spatial location of the events, and presenting characters and the main event or action. The adults still participated, but tended to concentrate on other questions, such as How? The role of the adults in this phase, as well as in the subsequent separation of the two types of naratives, is discussed elsewhere (cf. Perroni, 1984). At around 4;6, both children could produce proper narratives, and they only failed to do so if the interlocutors were not interested in engaging in the activity. Needless to say, the same happens among adults in ordinary interaction, since it seems most unlikely that one ever narrates to the walls.
4. Conclusion The conclusions to be drawn about the way in which narrative discourse is acquired by young children indicate the importance of the child’s experience of conversational interaction with an adult interlocutor. It seems reasonable to propose that no progress can be made in analyzing children’s narratives in isolation from the setting in which they are constructed. On the contrary, the results of this study point to a rejection of any approach which is an oversimplified interpretation of the ability to narrate in children. Such simplistic analyses, which consider children’s narratives as complete (as if an empirical interlocutor had not been present at the moment of production) fail to explain the question of houj children learn to narrate. In an attempt to answer this question, two crucial points must be considered. First, it seems
6 Obviously, it is not possible to determine exactly when different phases begin and end. Moreover, the transition from one phase to another can take more, or less time. This certainly depends on the degree of complexity of what is being acquired by the child.
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obvious that it is not reasonable to restrict the analysis of narrative discourse development to texts which fully satisfy all the criteria for the identification of narratives. Moreover, careful analysis of proto-narratives and strange narratives can shed some light on the procedures involved in the development of the ability to narrate. Second, one must not ignore the fact that, from the earliest phases, children are not left completely on their own to face the task of creating a narrative. In narratives, as in other forms of linguistic interaction, the role of the two participants in the conversation is too important to be ignored (see also Wells, 1981, and de Lemos, 198 1). As has been shown here, the first phase in a child’s acquisition of this type of discourse can be seen in the construction of proto-narratives by means of a collaborative interaction with an adult partner in conversation. In this initial proto-narrative phase, the two participants in the conversation - adult and child - work together interdependently. Still, the final product owes a great deal to the adult’s efforts to produce a coherent narrative in conjunction with the child’s contributions. During the phase of the primitive narrative technique, the role of classical children’s tales as narrative frameworks must not be neglected. As a matter of fact, by introducing parts of well-known stories in their narratives, children succeed in constructing longer texts. Even if the product may sometimes sound like nonsense, the overall formal structure of narrative discourse is gradually acquired. Considering that at this time children still have difficulties in retrieving the past, the strategy of inserting aspects of the present into their narratives should not be viewed negatively, especially since the relation of the present to non-present events can help in prolonging the narration. From this phase on, it is possible to see that the child is no longer so dependent on the adult for the production of narratives. However, even after this, the role of the interlocutor cannot be ignored, for we obviously build our narratives around a consideration of those to whom we are narrating. Depending on our interlocutors, we tend to stress or omit information about the spatial and/or temporal location of the events to be narrated. The same can be said about detailed information on characters, or even in respect to an evaluation of the effects or subjective meaning that the events narrated had upon us. This has also been stressed by Bamberg (in press), who shows how the reference act varies in narratives depending on the perspective taken. Our data on the proto-narrative phase supports the view that the role of the adult partner in narration is fundamental, as he/she adjusts the nature of the task to the phase of the child’s linguistic development. The WH questions directed to the children in this study show the provision of the narrative discourse structure. At the same time, the absence of temporal questions such as ‘when?’ can be seen as evidence for the adjustment to the phase of the child’s linguistic development. In fact, the lexical means for expressing temporal relations during data collection were found to be very limited in both children up to approximately 4;6 (cf. Perroni, 1983).
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The relations existing between narrative discourse development and the acquisition of linguistic expressions of temporal concepts are seen to be intricate and not yet sufficiently explored. If, as Piaget says “... temporal ideas are linked to memories . . .“, and “. . . memory is a reconstruction of the past, a ‘narrative’ . ..” (1969: 5), then the studies on narrative discourse development can contribute to the exploration of these relations. In this brief analysis of two subjects’ data. I hope to have provided arguments in favor of the view that the role of language in the construction of narratives is more relevant than it has traditionally been assumed. As Bamberg (in press) points out, the construction of a narrative is not simply a matter of mapping conceptual content into linguistic forms. On the contrary, language itself plays an important role in higher cognitive processes. Finally, a word about cultural differences. Although such differences certainly exist, they do not seem to be able to invalidate a socio-constructivist approach in studies of child language development. As far as narrative discourse is concerned, in analyzing the interactions of these two children with an adult partner in the Brazilian culture it was possible to determine the role of the children in the construction of narratives. The classical make-believe stories in Western culture today can be seen to play an important role in the acquisition of this type of discourse. Certainly, it would be interesting to observe and analyze how children in other cultures develop the ability to narrate through interaction with their partners. It may well be the case that other models are elected, and other strategies used (as shown by Heath, 1983). but these will certainly be closely related to the nature of the social/linguistic interactions in which people engage.
References
Applebee, Arthur N., 1978.The child’s concept of story. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bamberg, Michael, in press. Narrative as perspective taking. Journal of Cognitive Psychoterapy. Bloomfield, Leonard, 1933. Language. New York: Halt, Rinehart and Winston. Bruner, Jerome, 1975. From communication to language - A psychological perspective. Cognition 3(3): 225-287. Clancy, Patricia, 1980. The acquisition of narrative discourse: A study in Japanese. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International. Dore, John, 1979. Conversation and preschool language development. In: P. Fletcher and M. Garman, eds., Language acquisition, 337-361. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heath, Shirley B., 1983. Ways with words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kernan, Keith T., 1977. Semantic and expressive elaboration in children’s narratives. In: S. ErvinTripp and C. Mitchell-Kernan, eds., Child discourse, 91-102. New York: Academic Press. Kintsch, Walter and Teun van Dijk, 1975. Comment on se rappelle et on riisume des histoires. Langages 40: 98-116. Labov, William, 1972. Language in the inner city: Studies in the black English vernacular. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
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Labov, William and Joshua Waletsky, 1966. Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In: J. Helm, ed., Essays on the verbal and visual arts, 12-44. Seattle; WA: University of Washington Press. de Lemos, Claudia T.G., 1981. Interactional processes and the child’s construction of language. In: W. Deutsch, ed., The child’s construction of language, 57-76. New York: Academic Press. Mandler, Jean M., 1978. A code in the node: The use of story schema in retrieval. Discourse Processes 1: 14-35. Ninio, Anat and Jerome Bruner, 1978. The achievement and antecedents of labelling. Journal of Child Language 5: 1-15. Perroni, Maria C., 1983. Desenvolvimento do discurso narrativo. Ph.D. thesis, Department of Linguistics, State University of Campinas, Brazil. Perroni, Maria C., 1984. A bela e fera da AquisipHo da Linguagem. In: IberoAmericana, 17-29. Frankfurt: Verlag Klaus Dieter Vervuet. Peterson, Carole and Alisia McCabe, 1983. Developmental psycholinguistics: Three ways of looking at a child’s narrative. New York: Plenum Press. Piaget, Jean, 1969. The child’s conception of time. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Scollon, Ronald, 1979. A real early stage: An unzippered condensation of a dissertation in child language. In: E. Ckhs and B. Schieffelin, eds., Developmental pragmatics, 215-227. New York: Academic Press. Watson-Gegeo, Karen and Stephen Boggs, 1977. From verbal play to talk story: The role of routines in speech events among Hawaiian children. In: S. Ervin-Tripp and C. MitchellKernan, eds., Child discourse, 67-90. New York: Academic Press. Wells, Gordon, 1980. Apprenticeship in meaning. In: K.E. Nelson, ed., Children’s language, vol. 2: 45-125. New York: Gardner Press. Wells, Gordon, 1981. Learning through interaction: The study of language development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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North-Holland
On the acquisition of narrative A study in Portuguese
discourse:
Maria Cecilia Perroni * Received April 1989; revised version March 1993
This is a longitudinal, observational study of the development of narrative discourse, based on data from two Brazilian first-born children acquiring Portuguese as their native language. Tape recorded data were collected at weekly intervals from 2;l - 2;6 to 5;l. In the analysis of the children’s free interaction with an adult interlocutor in their home, the types of strategies underlying narrative constructions were identified. The results show that the first proto-narratives begin to manifest themselves from the verbal interaction of the child with an adult, and that the child interweaves real events with fantasy, making use of both linguistic and non-linguistic devices to narrate. A socio-constructivist approach is called on to explain the process of acquisition of narrative discourse. It is suggested that narratives are produced as a result of collaborative interactions between the two partners in actual conversations.
nomine de te Fabula narrator. (Horace, Satires I, i: 69) Mutato
1. Introduction Narrative discourse in children can be considered as one of the richest subjects of investigation in psycholinguistics, not only because of its peculiar discourse structure, but also because of its relation to memory processes. Displaced speech, at it is called by Bloomfield (1933) can be particularly difficult for young children, as it requires the ability to produce and comprehend language in the absence of contextual support from the here and now. The growing interest in the study of narrative discourse development in children is due to the influence of linguistic theories that consider larger and more complex units of analysis. In spite of this, the question of how children acquire the ability to narrate has hardly been touched, as the first analyses of * Correspondence to: M.C. Perroni, 6045, Campinas, S.P. 13081, Brazil. 0378-2166/93/$06.00
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narratives produced by children at various stages of linguistic development tended to concentrate only on the formal structure of narratives (cf. Kernan, 1977; Clancy, 1980; Peterson et al., 1983). In her analysis of data collected among 60 Japanese children aged 3;8 to 7;4, Clancy (1980) did not succeed in identifying developmental stages, nor in finding an explanation for how narratives can develop. According to her, there is a lack of longitudinal studies that could produce information on how children develop narrative discourse. Peterson et al. (1983) have tried to provide a structured description for their data, collected among 96 American children aged 3;6 to 9;6, but again, the three systems they used in their analysis could not account for the acquisition of this type of discourse. In fact, the great majority of the first attempts to describe and explain narrative discourse development in children’s data have tended to use linguistic theories that were created to analyze adult narratives - some focusing on syntax, some on semantics ~ in which the units of analysis are still either the sentence or the utterance. In so doing, these approaches tend to look at children’s narratives negatively, i.e., considering what is lacking in them, from the adult’s point of view.l In the present paper, I intend to make a more positive contribution to the study of narrative discourse development in children. My purpose is not to describe the final product, but rather, to describe and try to explain the very process of development of this type of discourse. In order to do so, I will use an approach to child language development in which the unit of analysis is the dialogue between the child and an adult. Since the early 1970’s, several criticisms of sentence-centered theories in language acquisition have emerged, some arguing that the child’s linguistic constructions cannot be fully understood outside the context of his/her linguistic interaction. But again, if we restrict ourselves exclusively to the crucial role of context (as was typical of the first pragmatic approaches to language acquisition), we will not be able to realize the progress that can be made if the child’s and the adult’s productions are considered jointly, rather than separately. In fact, nowadays there is growing agreement in the field about the limitations of those analyses that abstract the child’s productions from those of the adult partner in conversations. The role of the two participants in any communicative exchange was first taken into account in language acquisition studies in the 1970’s (e.g. Dore, 1979; Scollon, 1979) when some researchers tried to show the central place of the interaction with other, more mature members of the culture. According to this view, the child can learn by sharing with his/her interlocutor in the intersubjective construction of meaning (Wells, 1980: 46). It is also claimed (de Lemos, 1981) that social interaction and language development are interdependent processes that 1 See, for instance, the expression ‘lack a point’ in Kernan and impoverished narratives in Peterson et al. (1983).
(1977) and the notion
of disoriented
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should not be separated in any analysis, psycholinguistic or otherwise. According to de Lemos, in the early phases, language is acquired in the interaction between child and adult through specific dialogue processes that can explain the joint construction of communicative units. The roots of this view can be traced back to the work of Bruner (1975) who considered the acquisition of language as an inter-individual process, which requires interaction schemes between the child and the basic adult interlocutor in the prelinguistic period. This shift of interest in language acquisition studies towards a special emphasis on dialogue as the immediate and primary context for acquisition has proved worthy of further exploration. The task has been undertaken by those who share a socio-constructivist approach to language development and are influenced by Vygotsky’s view on language and cognitive processes. Among those who first analyzed children’s narratives, Watson-Gegeo and Boggs (1977) were an exception to the attempt to use classical linguistic theories to explain child language. Starting with no specific linguistic theory in mind to describe their data, they managed to show that their subjects (between 5;0 and 7;0 years old) were able to produce long and complex narratives in special circumstances of group interaction. These authors recognized the necessity of considering the situation of communication, as well as the role of specific texts which were used as models in the production of narratives. Although they have not analyzed the actual process of development of this type of discourse, they have made a contribution by showing how children learn though interaction. The same applies to Heath’s (1983) analysis of the differences in adult story-telling activities in two different American communities and the way that these affected the competence in narrative discourse developed by children.
2. Methodology 2.1. Subjects
The subjects were two Brazilian first-born girls, Natalia (N) and Daniela (D), from middle-class families, who lived in a monolingual environment and were acquiring Portuguese as their native language. Their parents all had university degrees, and three of them worked as university teachers. Both children were brought up in the home with their parents, although they also attended nursery school for four hours a day, beginning at age 3;0. Natalia was an only child until the end of the data collection - when the children were 5;l - and Daniela has had a sister since she was 2;0.
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2.2. Data collection Data were collected at weekly intervals from 2;1 to 5;l for Natalia, and from 2;6 to 5;l for Daniela. Data were collected at their homes by tape recording the spontaneous conversations between an adult (generally the mother) and the child. The two mothers had been studying language acquisition for some time, but during the sessions they tried to behave as naturally as possible with their children. During this phase of data collection, no particular aspect of language acquisition had been identified; consequently, no special attempts were made to control the productions of the children. In this longitudinal study, 114 hours of interaction in 196 sessions have been transcribed and analyzed. The tape recording of Daniela’s data amounts to 52 hours (104 sessions of 30 to 45 minutes each), with 62 hours in Natalia’s case (92 sessions of 30 to 45 minutes each). Given the fact that initially (at age 2;O) the two children were unable to produce proper narratives (cf. results and discussion), I decided to select all that was produced by the two participants -- adult and child ~ in narrative ‘contexts’. These were quite specific situations when the children were either looking at books and pretending to tell a story or trying to relate what had happened at some time (hours or days) before the session. All the instances of attempts to narrate in which the child participated in at least one turn were selected. As described in the following pages, this study deals with incompleteness, fragments, and poor attempts to narrate, if compared to adult narratives. However deviant, the children’s mistakes and incompleteness can nevertheless be seen as a very good source of information on the process of the acquisition of narrative discourse.
3. Discussion The analysis of narrative discourse in the language of these children starts with the observation of their first attempts to construct and/or report events occurring at a time prior to the time of utterance, as well as the first attempts to tell imaginary stories, Therefore, the study is not limited to narratives of personal experience, as defined by Labov (1972: 360) as: “one method of recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which actually occurred”. There are two principal reasons favoring the inclusion of stories in the analysis: both stories and personal narratives share the same typical formal features, as well as a role in the development of this type of discourse (cf. discussion on phase 2). In fact, temporal dependency between at least two events has traditionally been pointed out as the main characteristic of narratives, and this feature is obviously present in stories as well.
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3.1. First proto-narratives
Up to approximately three years of age, what was found in these children’s productions cannot be considered to be true narratives, if we stick to Labov’s definition. They are, rather, precursors to narratives. In this proto-narrative phase, the few utterances or parts of utterances in which the child refers to some detail of a past event seem to play a preparatory role for the emergence of true narratives. These are in a sense embryonic structures of narrative discourse, and they were constructed within a ‘telling game’, a kind of dialogue in which both adult and child take turns in an alternating pattern. In this ‘telling game’, the role and turns of the participating members are apparently rule-governed in a fashion similar to that form of dialogue identified by Ninio and Bruner (1978). At this phase, both children engaged in role playing and turn taking. As far as narrative discourse is concerned, initially the adult is by far the more skilled participant, and the situation clearly reflects his/her linguistic and cognitive superiority in relation to the child. Attempts to narrate are constructed as a collaborative activity; they are the result of a joint construction, which receives contributions from both participants. In fact, the adult frequently takes the initiative and elicits narratives from the child by directing quite specific questions, which require the development of a strategy of filling in the blanks. The questions are introduced by the adult in a suprisingly predictable order: they are the WH questions: WHERE - used to ask for the spatial location of the event evoked, e.g.: Where did you go yesterday with Granny? (ii) WHO, WITH WHOM, or WHAT - used to ask for the introduction of characters, human or non-human, characterized as subjects of the situation evoked, e.g.: Who was there? With whom did you go? What did you see there? (iii) WHAT plus verbs of action - used to ask about the action, or main event to be recalled, e.g.: What happened there? What did you do there?
(i)
It is interesting to note that in the data for both children the subsequent question in the order above was only added by the adult if a response to the previous one had been given by the child. The fact that these questions are made explicit in the speech of the adults can be related to Labov’s (1972 : 370) suggestion that narratives can also be seen as the result of a series of underlying questions, each one introducing narrative sections. Who?, When?, What? and Where? would introduce the orientation; questions like “Well, then what happened?” would introduce a complication section, and so on. In the children’s data, the first two types of questions can be said to help prepare for that which will eventually
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serve as the orientation of the narrative, while questions of the third type will contribute to the development of the complication, in Labov’s terms. The utterance fragments which the children offered in response to such elicitations by the adults consisted, in the great majority of cases, of references to entities which in some way could be related to the children’s own recent past experience being recalled. This seemed to accomplish the task imposed by the adult partner satisfactorily, as in (1): (1) (N. IV. 2;3) 1. M: Aonde voc2 ganhou este violdo? (Where did you get this guitar?) 2. N: Na feira, assim! (At the market, like that!) 3. M: Quem deu para vote? (Who gave (it) to you?) 4. N: A mamae! (Mummy!) 5. M: Ah, conta o que mais vod viu na feira. (Ah, tell what else you saw at the market) 6. N: Otu usinho! 6i esse aqui no marelinho . .. (‘Nother bear! Look at this yellow one . ..) 7. M: Conta o que vod viu na feira. Batata . . . (Tell what you saw at the market. Potatoes . ..) 8. N : Batata, came, cebola . . (Potatoes, meat, onions . ..) In proto-narratives, the child responds to adult questions by contributing short utterances, sometimes containing verbs inflected in the perfect tense. Yet, these are not true narrative, for they do not meet the temporal dependency criterion. This elicitation of narratives by the adult provides an excellent opportunity for the child to learn how to narrate, since it stimulates the detachment of the ‘here and now’. In a sense, the adults are offering their children a model for narratives, and in this type of linguistic interaction, attention is focused on the code itself. Indeed, the children do not seem to be concerned about the truth of the information content of the narratives they are constructing. In the data for this initial phase, parents were usually seen trying to make the children produce narratives about shared experiences, which means that they knew in advance what had to be told. In fact, there seems to be no other point in making the child tell what happened yesterday, when you already know, and there is no one else present to whom it could be informative. In this phase, then, little can be said about the information content of these jointly-constructed protonarratives.
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It should also be noted that during this phase I did not find adult questions containing items such as when, what day, for how long and others that might require the location of the narrated events on a temporal axis, and which would require the control of complex temporal concepts on the part of the child. In the data for Daniela, there are a few adult elicitations containing temporal elements as such,2 although these questions did not produce the intended effect. Indeed, the child’s responses to them showed an avoidance reaction characterized either by (a) failing to answer, (b) changing the topic of conversation, or (c) inserting now, the only lexical item used by the subject to express temporal relationships. Apart from these proto-narratives, some spontaneous attempts to narrate started to appear in the data for the two children at about 2;6, but only in response to adult elicitation were the subjects gradually able to relate more complex information. In the first spontaneous proto-narratives, the children only mentioned a single past event (or part of it), without relating it to another events, as in (2): (2) (N. X. 2;7) 1. M : Qued2 seu pai? (Where’s Daddy?) 2. N: Ta la! *.* de noite . . . peguei seu livro! (Over there! (she looks towards her father, seated nearby) . . . at night . . . I took your book‘) In (2) the child seems to recall something she did with one of Daddy’s books one night, but she still cannot narrate the whole event without the adult’s contribution. The tendency to recall a single aspect of a past experience can also be seen in Daniela’s data for the same period. In (3), for instance, although the adults requested that she tell about a trip they had taken a few days earlier, she only mentioned that she went on a boat. Once again, the fact that the adults did not continue asking her to tell about what had happened must have had some influence on her abandoning any further efforts to recall the whole episode. (3) (D. VII. 2;9) 1. F: Vamos ver se vod sabe contar. (Let’s see if you can tell me a story. (Father wanted her to tell about a trip they had taken together.))
* There were only five instances at all in Natalia’s data.
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2. M: A Daniela conta. (Daniela will tell you.) 3. D: Entlo . . . e . . . andei de barquinho ! (Then . . . and . . . I went on the boat!) (They go back to talking about the present
situation)
Even in contexts where this type of discourse could be expected to appear, the absence of narratives can be seen to be due to the lack of elicitation on the part of the adult who is present. This was clearly noticed when one of the children at 3;2 was looking at one of the books which were frequently used for story telling, but instead of telling the story, she limited herself to naming the entities present in the illustrations, just as she used to do in a previous naming game phase (cf. Ninio and Bruner, 1978). When Natalia was 2;5, embryonic narrative constructions of imaginary stories began to appear in her data. Similarly, when Daniela was 2;6, she could contribute to the telling of a story with the adult. These proto-narratives, like the ones of personal experience, were also constructed in conjunction with the adult, by means of the same WH questions. The parents not only elicited stories from their children, but from the beginning of the recording sessions they frequently told them classical stories, such as Cinderella, as well as some that belonged to the family’s repertoire of imaginary stories. In Natalia’s data for example, a tale called ‘The Talking Cricket’, invented and frequently told by her mother, played an important role in the narratives she created. Both kinds of stories share common features: the narrator never participates as a character in the plot, non-human beings can act as if they were human, and there is always a fixed plot. In this phase, then, the children are exposed to two distinct and still unrelated means of access to narrative discourse structure: (a) the ‘telling game’, an analytic process in which a previous experience must be recalled, and (b) the stories the adults tell their children, in which the same fixed plot is constantly repeated. Once the adult encourages the children to tell stories, he/she starts to reproduce and analyze the syntactic and semantic structure of the ready-made texts with which he/she is so familiar. The ability to order events in utterances, a necessary condition for narratives, owes a great deal to the numerous rehearsals of these make-believe narratives. The so-called stories that the child tells are advantageous for two reasons: they provide the young child with an opportunity to stick to a fixed plot, while simultaneously freeing him/her from the pressures of the ‘real world’. In fact, it seems difficult to prove a clear separation of fact and fiction in young children. According to Applebee (1978) for instance, children up to 6;0 tend to accept everything as real. For a child, the first interpretation of what a story is is that it is something that happened in the past.
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3.2. A primitive narrative technique
Gradually both children managed to participate more and more in the construction of narratives, especially in terms of quantity. After 3;0, they contributed more by ordering two events in the same utterance. Moreover, spontaneous attempts to narrate non-shared experience ceased to be so rare. Both children started to go to nursery school when they were 3;0, and from that time on they obviously started to have more experiences that were not shared by the parents. But this does not mean that they suddenly started telling the parents complete narratives of what had happened at school. After 3;0, however, attempts to narrate became more frequent and extensive, although the children’s constructions cannot be easily interpreted in terms of content. Some strange narratives began to appear, and one could easily label them ‘nonsense’ at first sight. However, it was possible to identify the use of a primitive narrative technique of the children in these utterances. When asked to tell what happened, their technique for producing more and longer narrative clauses seemed to be based on two devices: one exclusively linguistic, and the other non-linguistic. The linguistic device used in the construction of narratives was the coordination of sentences with specific lexical items: after (wards), (and) then, so. These items have been called ‘narrative operators’ (cf. Perroni, 1983) because they are abundantly used by children to make narratives longer: that is, they are used to link events in clauses. As a consequence, the children managed to produce more, even though a causal relationship cannot be said to exist. In order to satisfy the task of narrating in this phase, the children seem to fill in a narrative framework only formally, with little concern for the content of the episode. Indeed, this is the most plausible explanation for the emergence of ‘nonsense’ narratives such as (4). The use of such narrative operators is found in the data for both of the children after they were about 2;6. Whenever a narrative was to be produced, after, and, then, or so were present, even if there were no two events to be linked, as in (3). At this phase, the children were able to contribute more to the production of a narrative, either making use of a narrative operator to connect events of any kind together, or using the present to recover the past as in (4) and (5). They seemed to be aware that they were supposed to relate events temporally and inflect the verbs in their utterances in the past tense. They started doing this formally, but sometimes contradictions were found in the way they related events, as in (4): (4) (the child seems to invent a narrative) (N. XXVI. 3;2) 1. N: Onte tisti . . eu fui co . . co . . . co biluli na mao, eu nao comia mais, porque eu nao queria. (Yesterday I watched . . . I went with . . . with . . . with the sandwich in my hand, I didn’t eat it, because I didn’t want to.)
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2. M: Aonde que vod foi corn o biluli na mao? (Where did you go holding the sandwich in your hands?) 3. N: Aonde . . . eu joguei fora la na rua! (Where . . . I threw it away, in the street!) 4. F: Mas onde? (But where?) 5. M: Na rua. (In the road.) 6. F: Mas onde vote foi? (But where did you go?) 7. N: Eu fui no Bais. (I went to the market.) 8. F: Corn quem que voci foi? (With whom did you go?) 9. N: Sozinha. (On my own.) 10. M: E vod atravessou a rua sozinha? (And did you cross the road on your own?) 11. N.: Nao! (No !) .. (They talk about a yoghurt they are having.) 12. M: E dai, coma e que voc& voltou para casa? (And then, how did you get back home?) 13. N: De onibus. (By bus.) 14. F: Ahn . . . (Eh __.) 15. N : Aquela casa . . bem malelo. Igual daquele pano la, que ta na melancia. (That house . . . very yellow. The same as the cloth over there, which is on the watermelon.) 16. M : Papel! I? amarelo mesmo! ((surprised) It’s paper. It really is yellow.) 17. N: . . . aquela casa, bem igual da camisa do papai! (.. . that house, just like Daddy’s shirt!) 18. M: Aonde que i: essa casa? (Where is that house?) 19. N: La longe. Fui de Bnibus. (Far away. I went by bus.) 20. M: Ahn . (Oh!) 2 1. N : Agora que eu fui la no . . na minha casa, eu Go voltei aqui. (Now that I went there to . . . to my house, I didn’t come back here.)
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22. M: Nao? (You haven?t?) 23. N: Nao. (No. (I haven’t.)) In (4) the child tries to invent a narrative about a supposed past experience of going to the market on her own and throwing away a sandwich she was holding. However, the adults knew that it could not really have happened, so they started to ask her for more details (cf. (4) turns 2, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 18). The child seems to have made an effort to respond adequately, but in turn 21 she ended up by relating two events without regard to any plausibility of what was narrated: “Now that I went there to my house, I didn’t come back here”. Note that in this turn she manages to satisfy the main condition for a narrative, as she temporally.relates two events using verbs of action inflected in the past tense. The narrative is difficult, if not impossible, to interpret logically, because it lacks coherence and plausibility. There are as yet no precise restrictions as to the semantic nature of the events that are related in a plot. Although (4) can be seen to be an exercise at narrating on the part of the child, it is not difficult to see why the adults did not take it seriously and did not encourage it with further questions about the episode. The non-linguistic device present in this phase consisted of the insertion of aspects of the present situation into the child’s narratives. The procedure for the extension of narratives consisted of the insertion of either personal experiences occurring in the immediate interactional situation (e.g. the activities being engaged in at that moment), or of physical objects which were present. The children seemed to be using any aspect of the present that could be related in some way to the past experience being recalled as a means of retrieving the past. Physical objects, for example, were used as clues to recover distant and absent things by means of present and immediate things. In (4) this can be seen in turn 15, when the child compared the house she was talking about to the cloth covering the watermelon, which was present, and to the shirt Daddy was wearing, because all were yellow. The same device can also be seen in (5): (5) (N. XXXVI. 3;5) 1. M : VocC foi fazer exame de sangue ontem? (Did you have a blood test yesterday?) 2. N: Fui. (Yes.) 3. M: E que aconteceu la? (And what happened there?) 4. N. Eu fui . . . chorar la. (I went . . . to cry there.)
570 5.
6. 7. 8: 9.
10. 11.
12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.
M. C. Perroni 1 The acquisition of narrative discourw
M: Voci foi chorar la? (You went to cry there?) N: Fui. (Yes.) M: Como que o medico fez o exame para vote? (How did the doctor do the exam for you?) N: Foi, foi fazer o exame de, exame de sangue de, de, de tesoura. (He did the exam of, the exam of blood with, with, with scissors.) M: Nao, nao i: de tesoura. Uma agulhinha no braqo. Uma agulhinha que cutucou o braGo, Go foi? (No, it wasn’t with scissors. A little needle in your arm. A little needle that pricked your arm, wasn’t it?) N: Foi. (Yes.) M: Agulhinha cutucou o braGo e dai fez exame de sangue, ne? E que o medico falou para vote? (Little needle pricked your arm and then you had your blood test, wasn’t it? And what did the doctor tell you?) N: Falou que . . . que essa caixa de anel faz, faz a gente lembra. (He said that . . . that this box of rings makes, makes one remember.) M: Faz a gente lembri? (Makes one remember?) N: I?. Que a gente faz exame de sangue. (Yes. That we have a blood exam.) M: A, t? (Really?) N: kes.) M: Como que essa caixa faz vocC lembrar? (How can this box make you remember?) N: A, ela lembra assim mesmo. (Oh, it reminds me anyway.) M: Hum . . . (Oh . ..)
In (5), the adult still elicits a narrative about a shared experience from the child, suggesting in advance the situation to be recalled: the blood test (cf. turn l).” The mother keeps asking more questions, and in turns 8 and 12, the child mentions scissors and a box of rings. This can only be interpreted as an insertion of the present situation into the narrative. In fact, the box of rings 3 The child had had a blood test some days before. The mother was present all the time, which means that she knew what had happened. No one else was present at the time of the tape recording.
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mentioned was a little box in which her mother kept her costume jewellery, and with which the child had been playing during, the session. Although it may seem to be nonsense, it is not impossible to understand why the child chose it to recall the past experience of the blood test, instead of some other object visible at the time of interaction. The box of rings was related to the past experience narrated by the child, because it contained sharp objects, such as pins and a small pair of scissors, which can easily remind one of the needles that are used in blood tests. This use of the immediate context to recover the absent and distant was significantly made explicit by the child narrator in turn 12: “this box of rings makes one remember”. It is also important to notice that in (5) the child satisfies the task of narrating by filling in a narrative framework only formally, without regard for the factual content of the episode. In turn 12, her response utterance is semantically unrelated to what the doctor said (as requested in the adult’s question), but the child fills in the response. This ‘filling in’ is; however, characterized by the lack of a semantic link between the events or actions mentioned and the characters associated with them. What the child does is to ascribe to one of the characters, the doctor, a comment which is in reality hers. In this phase of somewhat unusual narratives that interweave real events with fantasy, the child starts to combine stories with narratives of personal experience. By mixing these two types of production, it is possible to expand a narrative quantitatively. Evidence for the insertion of personal experiences occurring in the immediate situation, as well as the use of a story framework, can be found in the great majority of the children’s narratives until approximately 4;0. All the strange creations exhibiting the use of at least one of these two devices were analyzed. The inspiration of a familiar narrative helped Natalia to create (6) for example: (6) (N. XxX1X. 3;6) 1. F: 8, eu ache que vote vai la, tomar banho. Se vote nao contar uma estoria pra mim, voc& vai tomar banho. (OK. I think you are going to take a bath. If you don’t tell me a story, you are going to take a bath.) 2. N: Eu ja conto uma estoria pro ce. Da girafa. (I’m going to tell you a story. Of the giraffe.) 3. F: Entao conta. (Then tell it.) 4. N: Onti, a girafa foi na casa dela, soveu muito, ela fez coca e . . . a mae dela falou assim pra girafa: “Nao vai na chuva! Nao vai na chuva!” Ela foi. Entao moreeeu. Ela ficou, ela ficou que nem zacare, Go queria tomar banho, entao ficou - zacale, de ca, de, de zacale. (Yesterday, the giraffe went home, it rained a lot, she made dodo and her mother told her: “Don’t go out in the rain! Don’t go out in the
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9. M: 10. N:
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rain!” She went out. Then she died. She became, she became like an alligator, she didn’t want to take a bath, then she became - alligator, with scales . . . of alligator.) Casca na perna, ni? (With scales on her legs, isn’t it?) fi. (Yes.) Mas Natalia Go vai ficar de jacark, nl? (But Natalia is not going to become an alligator, is she?) 8. EntBo, a mge dela bateu nela, ela acordou. Ela, ela, ela chorou, bateu nela. EnGo ela foi na casa dela, mostrou 15. Entao ela falou assim pra m8e dela: “Pbtistu! Pbtistu!” (Yes. Then her mother beat her, she woke up. She, she, she cried, she beat her. Then she went home, she showed there [unclear in Portuguese]. Then, she told her mother: (in a very low voice) “P&istu! Pbtistu!“) Daqui eu tiro pra vod. (Let me take this off for you. (about the immediate context)) Cab6ooooo! (That’s all!)
Here the child is only transporting the story frame of the talking cricket tale, which her mother used to tell her almost every night at that period, to the story of the giraffe. In that famous tale, the talking cricket had disobeyed his mother, and had gone barefoot in the rain (cf. turn 4), although his mother had warned him: “Don’t go out in the rain!“. As for the use of the present situation in (6), the child’s inspiration comes from her own experience at the time of the interaction: she didn’t want to take a bath, and when asked to tell a story, she invented the narrative of the giraffe who “didn’t want to take a bath” (cf. turn 4). In addition, the same thing happens in the child’s attempts at elaborating reported speech forms in this phase. In all of her narratives, the characters are still presented as if they had no identity independent of the discourse in which they are inserted. Constructions with verbs of saying may show this, as in (5), turn 12, and in (6), turns 4 and 8. Again in (6), the quoted speech in turn 4 is identical to that frequently used by the child’s mother when telling the cricket tale. The child is then incorporating classic quoted speeches into her narratives. In fact, Daniela made no ceremony of inserting familiar quotes in her narratives, such as “Call the guards”, “Cut her head off!“, “Why such big eyes?“. It seems plausible to suggest that the first usages of quoted speech arise as fillers of grammatical positions created in utterances with verbs of saying, which favor the use of the mechanism of formal construction of a citation as such. The task of giving voice to characters in narratives seems to arise, therefore, as subsequent to the
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grammatical marking of citation. The child’s incorporation of the mother’s construction in the same context is evident, especially when one considers her attempt to construct quoted speech in turn 8. There, she marks through intonation the grammatical position of a quotation, but only succeeds in inserting an odd lexical item in a very low voice: “Potistu!“. In fact, there is no such word or expression in Portuguese, but the child is marking the proper place of a quote in the narrative. The child’s inspiration for applying the framework of the talking cricket tale to her narrative seems to be evidence for Mandler’s assumption that “... story schemata are acquired through the experience with listening to stories”, and that “... children not only use familiar story schemata, but depend on them to organize recall even more than do adults” (1978: 17). Furthermore, the early concepts of story schemata and of macro-structures, as proposed by Kintsch and Van Dijk (1975) can be compared to Labov and Waletsky’s (1966) proposal of the organization of narratives in sections, in the sense that both emphasize the highly organized structure of narratives. Although children’s proto-narratives cannot be said to show a similar complex organization, such concepts can be useful in analyzing children’s acquisition of adult narrative discourse. In the early phases, children start to identify the underlying structure of this type of discourse in the stories adults tell them, or make them (re)tell. As soon as they can break stories down, they start using the formal markers in the production of their own narratives. My data seem to provide evidence for claiming that stories also play a role in the development of narrative discourse in children, since they provide a narrative framework for the relation of singular events. 4 In these early phases, the underlying notion of a narrative seemed to be nothing more than a special type of discourse in which any two events are linked with after, and, then, or so, and where there are verbs of action/activity inflected in the past tense. 5 Once having abstracted the framework for this type of discourse, the children went ahead and developed devices for filling in the spaces in the same way. They did so either by inserting elements of the present situation, collagelike, in their narratives, or by freely combining random events or actions, ascribing a status of past reality to them and inflecting the verbs in the past tense. Sometimes they even invented new lexical items to fill in grammatical positions, as in (6). The creation of odd lexical items in narratives was characteristic of both children’s constructions during this phase. They tended 4 Peterson et al. (1983) were also conscious of the role of classical stories as a standard for setting a pattern. Although their definition of narratives precluded total inventions, they could see a clear connection between narrative and fiction (1983: 196). They suggest that: “the structure of personal narratives is probably formed by the stories to which we are exposed” (ibid.: 208). 5 Although I have concentrated here on some recent work by linguists, I should mention that the views of some literary theorists on the nature of narrative discourse can also be useful in interpreting my data. This is explored elsewhere (cf. Perroni, 1983).
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to combine smaller units such as phonemes and morphemes to form new words that are not actual Portuguese words, i.e. words not found in the adult system. As I have been trying to show here, this creative combination of units was not limited to the production of words; at the same time the two children combined larger units such as clauses to produce a narrative text. Undoubtedly, in this phase both children could deal with language as an object upon which one acts. Even after age 4;0, some difficult-to-interpret narratives such as the ones discussed here can still be found .6 Nevertheless, the narratives of both children gradually improved, and more and more sophisticated and adult-like texts were created. Both children became active in the construction of narratives, taking the initiative, and assuming the role of narrator. They spontaneously narrated non-shared experiences, which were often genuinely informative. At around 4;6, the adult’s role in narrative constructions was no longer clearly directive. No longer were typical WH questions asked so frequently, because the child herself initiated narratives providing the spatial location of the events, and presenting characters and the main event or action. The adults still participated, but tended to concentrate on other questions, such as How? The role of the adults in this phase, as well as in the subsequent separation of the two types of naratives, is discussed elsewhere (cf. Perroni, 1984). At around 4;6, both children could produce proper narratives, and they only failed to do so if the interlocutors were not interested in engaging in the activity. Needless to say, the same happens among adults in ordinary interaction, since it seems most unlikely that one ever narrates to the walls.
4. Conclusion The conclusions to be drawn about the way in which narrative discourse is acquired by young children indicate the importance of the child’s experience of conversational interaction with an adult interlocutor. It seems reasonable to propose that no progress can be made in analyzing children’s narratives in isolation from the setting in which they are constructed. On the contrary, the results of this study point to a rejection of any approach which is an oversimplified interpretation of the ability to narrate in children. Such simplistic analyses, which consider children’s narratives as complete (as if an empirical interlocutor had not been present at the moment of production) fail to explain the question of houj children learn to narrate. In an attempt to answer this question, two crucial points must be considered. First, it seems
6 Obviously, it is not possible to determine exactly when different phases begin and end. Moreover, the transition from one phase to another can take more, or less time. This certainly depends on the degree of complexity of what is being acquired by the child.
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obvious that it is not reasonable to restrict the analysis of narrative discourse development to texts which fully satisfy all the criteria for the identification of narratives. Moreover, careful analysis of proto-narratives and strange narratives can shed some light on the procedures involved in the development of the ability to narrate. Second, one must not ignore the fact that, from the earliest phases, children are not left completely on their own to face the task of creating a narrative. In narratives, as in other forms of linguistic interaction, the role of the two participants in the conversation is too important to be ignored (see also Wells, 1981, and de Lemos, 198 1). As has been shown here, the first phase in a child’s acquisition of this type of discourse can be seen in the construction of proto-narratives by means of a collaborative interaction with an adult partner in conversation. In this initial proto-narrative phase, the two participants in the conversation - adult and child - work together interdependently. Still, the final product owes a great deal to the adult’s efforts to produce a coherent narrative in conjunction with the child’s contributions. During the phase of the primitive narrative technique, the role of classical children’s tales as narrative frameworks must not be neglected. As a matter of fact, by introducing parts of well-known stories in their narratives, children succeed in constructing longer texts. Even if the product may sometimes sound like nonsense, the overall formal structure of narrative discourse is gradually acquired. Considering that at this time children still have difficulties in retrieving the past, the strategy of inserting aspects of the present into their narratives should not be viewed negatively, especially since the relation of the present to non-present events can help in prolonging the narration. From this phase on, it is possible to see that the child is no longer so dependent on the adult for the production of narratives. However, even after this, the role of the interlocutor cannot be ignored, for we obviously build our narratives around a consideration of those to whom we are narrating. Depending on our interlocutors, we tend to stress or omit information about the spatial and/or temporal location of the events to be narrated. The same can be said about detailed information on characters, or even in respect to an evaluation of the effects or subjective meaning that the events narrated had upon us. This has also been stressed by Bamberg (in press), who shows how the reference act varies in narratives depending on the perspective taken. Our data on the proto-narrative phase supports the view that the role of the adult partner in narration is fundamental, as he/she adjusts the nature of the task to the phase of the child’s linguistic development. The WH questions directed to the children in this study show the provision of the narrative discourse structure. At the same time, the absence of temporal questions such as ‘when?’ can be seen as evidence for the adjustment to the phase of the child’s linguistic development. In fact, the lexical means for expressing temporal relations during data collection were found to be very limited in both children up to approximately 4;6 (cf. Perroni, 1983).
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The relations existing between narrative discourse development and the acquisition of linguistic expressions of temporal concepts are seen to be intricate and not yet sufficiently explored. If, as Piaget says “... temporal ideas are linked to memories . . .“, and “. . . memory is a reconstruction of the past, a ‘narrative’ . ..” (1969: 5), then the studies on narrative discourse development can contribute to the exploration of these relations. In this brief analysis of two subjects’ data. I hope to have provided arguments in favor of the view that the role of language in the construction of narratives is more relevant than it has traditionally been assumed. As Bamberg (in press) points out, the construction of a narrative is not simply a matter of mapping conceptual content into linguistic forms. On the contrary, language itself plays an important role in higher cognitive processes. Finally, a word about cultural differences. Although such differences certainly exist, they do not seem to be able to invalidate a socio-constructivist approach in studies of child language development. As far as narrative discourse is concerned, in analyzing the interactions of these two children with an adult partner in the Brazilian culture it was possible to determine the role of the children in the construction of narratives. The classical make-believe stories in Western culture today can be seen to play an important role in the acquisition of this type of discourse. Certainly, it would be interesting to observe and analyze how children in other cultures develop the ability to narrate through interaction with their partners. It may well be the case that other models are elected, and other strategies used (as shown by Heath, 1983). but these will certainly be closely related to the nature of the social/linguistic interactions in which people engage.
References
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Labov, William and Joshua Waletsky, 1966. Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In: J. Helm, ed., Essays on the verbal and visual arts, 12-44. Seattle; WA: University of Washington Press. de Lemos, Claudia T.G., 1981. Interactional processes and the child’s construction of language. In: W. Deutsch, ed., The child’s construction of language, 57-76. New York: Academic Press. Mandler, Jean M., 1978. A code in the node: The use of story schema in retrieval. Discourse Processes 1: 14-35. Ninio, Anat and Jerome Bruner, 1978. The achievement and antecedents of labelling. Journal of Child Language 5: 1-15. Perroni, Maria C., 1983. Desenvolvimento do discurso narrativo. Ph.D. thesis, Department of Linguistics, State University of Campinas, Brazil. Perroni, Maria C., 1984. A bela e fera da AquisipHo da Linguagem. In: IberoAmericana, 17-29. Frankfurt: Verlag Klaus Dieter Vervuet. Peterson, Carole and Alisia McCabe, 1983. Developmental psycholinguistics: Three ways of looking at a child’s narrative. New York: Plenum Press. Piaget, Jean, 1969. The child’s conception of time. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Scollon, Ronald, 1979. A real early stage: An unzippered condensation of a dissertation in child language. In: E. Ckhs and B. Schieffelin, eds., Developmental pragmatics, 215-227. New York: Academic Press. Watson-Gegeo, Karen and Stephen Boggs, 1977. From verbal play to talk story: The role of routines in speech events among Hawaiian children. In: S. Ervin-Tripp and C. MitchellKernan, eds., Child discourse, 67-90. New York: Academic Press. Wells, Gordon, 1980. Apprenticeship in meaning. In: K.E. Nelson, ed., Children’s language, vol. 2: 45-125. New York: Gardner Press. Wells, Gordon, 1981. Learning through interaction: The study of language development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.