Wigglesworth G
Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, North Ryde, NSW, Australia.
J Child Lang. 1997 Jun;24(2):279-309. doi: 10.1017/s0305000997003048.
This paper investigates the similarities and differences observed in individual approaches to the linguistic organization of narrative. Twenty subjects in each of five age groups (four, six, eight, ten years and adult) were asked to relate a narrative elicited from a picture book. All references to the animate characters in the book were coded for form (nominal/pronominal), and function (switch versus maintenance). Individual analyses of the narratives indicated that a variety of strategies were used across all age groups. Strategies identified included thematic subject, nominal and anaphoric. When the narrative was divided into segments based on the referential load of each segment, it was found that there was an interaction between the strategy adopted in the first segment, the age of the subject and the referential load of subsequent segments. A variety of strategies was adopted by all age groups although there were preferential trends observable within each group. The ability to maintain a strategy across the varying referential load of the narrative increased with age. Five developmental stages were identified from the analysis which enabled certain tentative predictions to be made about the way children approach a complex narrative task, suggesting that children pass through a number of stages which reflect their ability to organize the referential content of the narrative at differing speech levels.
本文研究了在叙述性语言组织的个体方法中观察到的异同。五个年龄组（四岁、六岁、八岁、十岁和成年人）中的每组二十名受试者被要求讲述从一本图画书中引出的故事。书中所有与有生命角色的指代都按照形式（名词性/代词性）和功能（转换与维持）进行编码。对这些故事的个体分析表明，所有年龄组都使用了多种策略。识别出的策略包括主题主语、名词性和指代性。当根据每个片段的指代负荷将故事分为不同片段时，发现第一段所采用的策略、受试者的年龄与后续片段的指代负荷之间存在相互作用。所有年龄组都采用了多种策略，尽管每组中都有可观察到的偏好趋势。随着年龄增长，在故事不同指代负荷下维持一种策略的能力有所提高。从分析中识别出了五个发展阶段，这使得能够对儿童处理复杂叙事任务的方式做出某些初步预测，表明儿童会经历多个阶段，这些阶段反映了他们在不同语言水平上组织故事指代内容的能力。
