Researchers from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and the Autonomous University of Madrid have provided new evidence on the importance of narrative discourse for cognitive and linguistic development in childhood. The work, published in the journal Estudos da Linguagem, lays the groundwork for developing educational materials in Spanish-speaking classrooms.
A team of researchers from the Centro Interdisciplinario de Investigaciones en Psicología Matemática y Experimental (CIIPME-CONICET), with the collaboration of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), has carried out a study on the construction of coherence in narratives of 3-, 4- and 5-year-old children.
Published in the journal Estudos da Linguagem, the paper examines how children, in narrating personal experiences, employ key resources for their linguistic and cognitive development, especially the management of causality.
According to Dr. Celia Rosemberg, co-author of the study and director of CIIPME, narratives based on personal experiences are some of the earliest forms of discourse produced by infants. "These narratives are very important, as they are deeply interrelated with cognitive development and also with socioemotional development," the researcher emphasizes.
The results indicate that boys and girls in all three age ranges are able to establish connections between narrated events not only causally, but also temporally and thematically. "Predominantly, causal relationships are associated with the physical rather than the mental domain, suggesting that more complex relationships may develop in later stages of growth," the researchers argue.
In addition," they add, "we observe that with age, the number and diversity of causal relationships increases. This means that, as they grow older, children not only create more causal links between events, but these links become more and more varied. As a result, narratives become longer, more complex, and more coherent."
What did you do at school today?
The researchers also identified narratives with disconnected, isolated events or without direct causal relationships (’dead-end’ events). However, "these elements are usually related to different components of the narrative information that enrich the coherence of the story in other dimensions, including details and descriptions of the events, as well as contextualizations and evaluations of them," explains Ailín Franco Accinelli, member of CIIPME, guest researcher at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) and first author of the paper.
Given the complexity that it can represent for young children to elaborate a coherent narrative, and considering the close relationship between literacy and the ability to create coherent and structured narratives, the findings of this study represent a valuable contribution to the educational field.
"Specifically, understanding narrative coherence, in particular causal coherence, and its role in children’s narrative development, can serve as a basis for the creation of assessment tools and educational intervention strategies," says Franco Accinelli.
"Thus," adds the researcher, "when interacting with our sons and daughters, nephews or nieces or little brothers and sisters, we should not hesitate to ask them, ’What did you do at school today?’ This simple question not only fosters their narrative ability, but also supports their cognitive and linguistic development.
Narrative coherence and causality
For an account of personal experience to be comprehensible to a listener who is unfamiliar with the facts narrated, it is essential that the account be coherent. This implies that all parts of the story must be interconnected in a convincing and satisfactory manner.
Until now, research on narrative coherence had emphasized the structure of the story, that is, its organization and the components that make it up, leaving aside the analysis of causality as an essential element for narrative coherence.
In sum, this new work evidences that causal relations play a crucial role in the way personal experience is represented, highlighting the way in which children link the elements that make up events (time, space, actions and people) with their own evaluations or perceptions.
"It is important to highlight that, in order to explore how children establish different causal relationships between the events they narrate, most previous studies have focused on children from middle-income sectors and, for the most part, English speakers. Therefore, our work, focused on the personal experiences of Spanish-speaking children attending educational institutions in marginalized urban neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, acquires a special relevance", conclude the authors.
Bibliographic reference:
Franco Accinelli, A. P., Stein, A. & Rosemberg, C. What, where, how, when, why? The construction of causal coherence in children’s accounts of personal experience. Revista de Estudos da Linguagem. 54(1),pp.147’152 . doi: https://doi.org/10.31810/rsel.54.1.6
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