The Development of Autonomy in Preschool Mandarin Chinese-Speaking Children's Play Narratives

Abstract

This paper aims to examine to what extent preschool Mandarin Chinese-speaking children can create an autonomous replica play narrative. Twenty-four Taiwanese children, 12 four-year-olds and 12 six-year-olds, participated in this study. The focus of investigation is on the linguistic resources (i.e., temporal and referential devices) the children use to maintain story lines and to mark shifts between types of talk in replica play. Developmental shifts are evident in these children's use of temporal and referential devices to build up a coherent play narrative. The four-year-olds exhibit a great difficulty sustaining their narrative talk, making use of temporal devices, and managing reference in their replica play. The six-year-olds, in comparison, use clearer reference and more temporal and causal connectives, but their ability to achieve autonomy in play narratives is limited. Developmental differences found in this study, in general, accord with crosslinguistic results.

<B>"But I first... and then he kept picking"</B><BR> Narrative skill in Mandarin-speaking children with language impairment

“…Adapted from Erbaugh's (1992) and Li and Thompson's (1981) analysis of temporal categories in Mandarin Chinese as well as Chang's (1998;) studies on temporal markers in preschool Mandarin-speaking children, three main categories of connectives are coded in this study:…”

“…Based on Li and Thompson's (1981) analysis of referential devices in Mandarin Chinese as well as previous studies on referential strategies of Mandarin-speaking children (Chang, 1998;Sung, 2004;Wang, 1998), seven referential devices were classified:…”

Narrative, Imaginary Play, Art, and Self: Intersecting Worlds

“…Thus, examining children's narratives offers an important way to understand how children construct meaning about their worlds and their place in it (Kyratzis, 1999(Kyratzis, , 2000Kyratzis & Green, 1997;Miller & Mehler, 1994;Miller, Potts, Fung, Hoogstra, & Mitz, 1990). However, while there are some examples of research on children and narrative in the overlapping disciplines of psychology and linguistics, focusing on narrative skills or functional aspects (Chang, 1998;Heath, 1982;Kyratzis, 2000;Miller, Minz, Hoogsta, Fung, & Potts, 1992), studies of spontaneous stories composed by children during play activities are rare. The intention of this study, therefore, was to fill this gap by investigating the narratives of young children and what these narratives might reveal about the ways in which children construct meaning about their worlds and their place in it.…”

“…Children encounter and use narrative in diverse ways such as oral, written and visual contexts. For instance, it happens through telling and retelling personal experiences (Miller & Mehler, 1994), creating stories while playing with others (Chang, 1998;Kyratzis, 1999), reading and listening to literature (Bettelheim, 1976;Freedman, 1992;Reese, 2001), and drawing and painting where narrative is used to explain an event, idea, or some phenomena (Kellman, 1995;Malchiodi, 1998). These stories serve not only as a venue for self-expression and communication with others, but also as a means of meaning-making out of lived experience.…”

Tense and temporality

“…It has been found that 4-year-olds have great difficulty making use of temporal devices to maintain story lines, whereas 6-year-olds demonstrate an ability to use more temporal and causal connectives (Chang, 1998). In summary, existing studies (Chang, 1998;Erbaugh, 1978Erbaugh, , 1985Erbaugh, , 1992Huang, 2003;Li & Bowerman, 1998;Lin, 1986;Zhu et al, 1982) indicate that the acquisition of Mandarin temporality shares many similarities with that of children speaking other languages.…”