Griffith Institute for Educational Research, Griffith University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia.
Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA.
Folia Phoniatr Logop. 2023;75(6):480-494. doi: 10.1159/000533138. Epub 2023 Jul 24.
It has been well established that the function of sharing personal narratives is to inform the listener about what the event meant to the narrator, for example, by using a range of evaluative devices. The use of these evaluative devices may reflect a person's understanding of the differences between one's own mind and others, by expressing their beliefs, emotions, thoughts, and desires. This paper investigates children's use of evaluative devices when producing personal narratives in response to the six emotion-based prompts contained in the Global TALES protocol (excited, worried, annoyed, proud, problem situation, something important). It addresses three research questions: (1) What types and proportions of evaluative devices do 10-year-old English-speaking children use in response to the six prompts contained in the Global TALES protocol and are there differences in performance between boys and girls? (2) What are the correlations between the different types of evaluative devices? (3) Does children's use of evaluative devices differ depending on the type of prompt used?
Eighty-two native English-speaking ten-year-old children from three English-speaking countries (Australia, New Zealand, and the USA) participated. None of the children had been identified with language and/or learning difficulties. Children's personal narratives were transcribed and analysed for the use of 12 evaluative devices: compulsion, internal emotional states, evaluative words, intensifiers, mental states, causal explanations, hypotheses, objective judgements, subjective judgements, intent, negatives, and repetition.
Results showed that children use a high number of evaluative devices, with "intensifiers" and "evaluative words" used most frequently. There were few effects for sex, apart from girls using a wider range of evaluative devices than boys. We found moderate to large correlations between most devices, with factor analysis revealing three factors we labelled "causality," "hypothesis," and "judgement." Although there were significant overall effects for prompt type on the use of evaluative devices, there was no clear pattern when inspecting responses to individual prompts.
The results from this study shed light on children's use of evaluative devices to convey the meaning of their personal narratives in response to six different prompts tapping into different emotions. Moving beyond appraising children's structural language skills when narrating their personal experiences may enhance the understanding of interpersonal and intrapersonal aspects of theory of mind, which may inform clinical practices, such as individualized goal setting and intervention choices.
人们已经充分认识到，分享个人叙事的功能是向听众传达事件对讲述者的意义，例如通过使用一系列评价手段。这些评价手段的使用可能反映了一个人对自己的思想和他人的思想之间差异的理解，通过表达他们的信念、情感、思想和欲望。本文调查了儿童在回应全球 TALES 协议（兴奋、担忧、恼怒、自豪、问题情况、重要事情）中包含的六个基于情绪的提示时，在生成个人叙事中使用评价手段的情况。它解决了三个研究问题：（1）10 岁英语为母语的儿童在回应全球 TALES 协议中包含的六个提示时，使用了哪些类型和比例的评价手段，男孩和女孩的表现是否存在差异？（2）不同类型的评价手段之间有什么相关性？（3）评价手段的使用是否因提示类型而异？
来自三个英语国家（澳大利亚、新西兰和美国）的 82 名 10 岁的以英语为母语的儿童参与了研究。这些儿童中没有一个被确定有语言和/或学习困难。对儿童的个人叙事进行了转录和分析，以确定使用了 12 种评价手段：强制、内部情绪状态、评价性词汇、强化语、心理状态、因果解释、假设、客观判断、主观判断、意图、否定词和重复。
结果表明，儿童使用了大量的评价手段，其中“强化语”和“评价性词汇”使用最频繁。性别方面的影响很小，除了女孩比男孩使用更多种类的评价手段。我们发现大多数设备之间存在中等至较大的相关性，通过因子分析揭示了我们称之为“因果关系”、“假设”和“判断”的三个因素。尽管提示类型对评价手段的使用有显著的总体影响，但在检查对个别提示的反应时，没有明显的模式。
这项研究的结果揭示了儿童在回应六个不同的提示时，使用评价手段来传达个人叙事的意义，这些提示涉及不同的情绪。超越评估儿童在讲述个人经历时的结构语言技能，可能会增强对心理理论的人际和内在方面的理解，这可能会影响临床实践，如个体化目标设定和干预选择。
