“And then he was so happy!”:

Evaluation and Coherencein Latino Narratives

Jamie González

Department of Applied Psychology

New York University

Acknowledgements

All members of the Child Language Research Team

Special Thanks to:

Gigliana Melzi, Ph.D.Margaret Caspe, Ph.D.Adina SchickAlexandra Rodríguez

Children’s Narrative Development

Across cultures, stories play an integral role in various aspects of children’s development.

A good narrative provides a skillful organization of relevant and necessary information.

It combines two types of information:

1. Referential Information – based on concrete activities and observable descriptions.

2. Evaluative Information – narrator’s reactions and interpretations.

The information must be presented in a coherent manner.

Referential Information

An owl came out of the tree. The boy fell on the ground. The dog was being chased by bees.

Evaluative Information

Boo! The mean owl fleeew out of the tree. “Oh no!” The boy fell on the ground. “Ouch!”

The dog is running running running. The bees are going to catch him!

Evaluation in Children’s Narratives

At all ages, children use evaluation, but as they get older, they begin to include more kinds of evaluation in their narratives.

There has been little consistency in the way evaluation has been examined by child language researchers.

Some studies have focused on the linguistic features of evaluation, whereas others have focused on its role in conveying emotion.

Though evaluation plays a valuable role in narratives, its simple presence is not enough to make a story coherent.

Narrative coherence is “the orderly flow of information that makes sense to the listener” (McCabe & Peterson, 1991, p. 93).

Peterson and McCabe (1983) classified the development of children’s narrative coherence:

“Leap-frog” narratives

“Chronological” narratives

“Ending-at-the-high-point” narratives

“Classic” narratives

Narrative Coherence

Narrative coherence is “the orderly flow of information that makes sense to the listener” (McCabe & Peterson, 1991, p. 93).

Peterson and McCabe (1983) classified the development of children’s narrative coherence:

“Leap-frog” narratives Unsystematic jumps from event to event Excluding important events in the narrative

“Chronological” narratives

“Ending-at-the-high-point” narratives

“Classic” narratives

Narrative Coherence

Narrative coherence is “the orderly flow of information that makes sense to the listener” (McCabe & Peterson, 1991, p. 93).

Peterson and McCabe (1983) classified the development of children’s narrative coherence:

“Leap-frog” narratives

“Chronological” narratives Ordering main events in a chronological sequence Giving little meaning to the events that occurred

“Ending-at-the-high-point” narratives

“Classic” narratives

Narrative Coherence

Narrative Coherence

Narrative coherence is “the orderly flow of information that makes sense to the listener” (McCabe & Peterson, 1991, p. 93).

Peterson and McCabe (1983) classified the development of children’s narrative coherence:

“Leap-frog” narratives

“Chronological” narratives

“Ending-at-the-high-point” narratives Ending with the climactic point of the narrative Providing little to no solutions to the problem

“Classic” narratives

Narrative Coherence

Narrative coherence is “the orderly flow of information that makes sense to the listener” (McCabe & Peterson, 1991, p. 93).

Peterson and McCabe (1983) classified the development of children’s narrative coherence:

“Leap-frog” narratives

“Chronological” narratives

“Ending-at-the-high-point” narratives

“Classic” narratives Information is carefully organized around a central point or problem in the story The problem in the story is solved

Narrative Coherence

Narrative coherence is “the orderly flow of information that makes sense to the listener” (McCabe & Peterson, 1991, p. 93).

Peterson and McCabe (1983) classified the development of children’s narrative coherence:

“Leap-frog” narratives

“Chronological” narratives

“Ending-at-the-high-point” narratives

“Classic” narratives

This seminal study, like many others exploring narrative coherence, was based on data from English-speaking European-American children.

Cultural Variations in Narratives

Studies on different ethnic and cultural communities have shown that there is no universal prescription for telling a good story.

Within US society, there is a widespread misconception that a narrative must have a clear beginning, middle, and end.

Children from other cultural groups have different ways of organizing information to create a coherent story.

Children’s narrative abilities develop within their social and cultural contexts.

The purpose of the current study was to examine the use of narrative evaluation and coherence in the independent narrations of Latino preschool children.

Research Questions

(1)What types of evaluation are most used by 4-year-old Latino children?

(2)How does their use of evaluation relate to the overall narrative coherence?

The Current Study

Participants (N = 73) Children (36 girls and 37 boys) recruited for a larger study participated in the present investigation.

The mean age of participants was 57 months of age (SD = 3.8), and they were all in their last year of Head Start.

Ethnicity of participants: 53% (n = 39) Dominican 32% (n = 23) Mexican 15% (n = 11) Other Latino

Language dominance: 56% (n = 41) Spanish only 27% (n = 20) Bilingual, English-Spanish 4% (n = 9) English only 12% (n = 3) English, bilingual comprehension

Procedure

Participants were visited at their Head Start programs during school hours and interviewed individually in a quiet space.

Children’s language dominance was assessed first, and independent narrations were then elicited.

All children were asked to tell their stories based on the wordless picture book, One Frog Too Many (Mayer & Mayer, 1975).

Narratives were audio taped and transcribed using a standardized system (MacWhinney, 2000).

Coding Evaluation

Every instance of evaluation was coded based on an adaptation of the evaluation coding scheme used in Peterson and McCabe (1983).

The following types of evaluation were coded for:

Subjective (e.g., the frog was jealous)

Qualifier (e.g., he was really mad)

Performed (e.g., she was running running running)

Causality (e.g., he ran because he was scared)

Children’s narratives also received an evaluation diversity score, capturing the extent to which children varied their use of evaluation (range = 0 - 14).

Coding Coherence

Coherence was coded using story grammar analysis, which divides the story into four main episodes.

Coding of narrative elements was conducted on a presence/absence basis.

Overall coherence score was determined by adding the number of narrative elements included in the story (range = 0 - 30).

Inter-rater reliability was established using 14% of the data (86% inter-rater agreement).

      YES NO

SETTING EVNT The boy gets a present    

  EVNT The boy opens the box    

  REA The boy and his pets are happy    

         

EPISODE 1 EVNT The child gets a new frog.    

  MTSThe big frog is unhappy (jealous) about the new frog.    

  EVNT The boy introduces the new frog to his pets.    

  MTS The big frog has evil (scheming) thoughts.    

  ATTM The big frog bites the little frog's leg.    

  CONS The boy and the other pets scold the big frog.    

  CONS The big frog is not happy.    

         

EPISODE 2 EVNT The boy and his pets go to the forest to play.    

  ATTM The big frog kicks the little frog off the turtle.    

  CONS The boy and the other pets scold the big frog.    

  CONS The little frog cries    

  CONSAs punishment, the boy and his pets leave the big frog behind.    

Coding Coherence

Coherence was coded using story grammar analysis, which divides the story into four main episodes.

Coding of narrative elements was conducted on a presence/absence basis.

Overall coherence score was determined by adding the number of narrative elements included in the story (range = 0 - 30).

Inter-rater reliability was established using 14% of the data (86% inter-rater agreement).

Analyses

Types of Evaluation Descriptive statistics were used to determine:

Frequency of evaluation Percentage of narrative that was evaluative

Evaluation and Narrative Coherence

Descriptive statistics were first used to determine:

Children’s evaluation diversity Children’s level of narrative coherence

Correlations and ANOVAs were employed to:

Examine the relation between coherence and evaluation

Children’s Narratives: Evaluation Overall, the children’s stories contained an average of 44 utterances (SD = 26.9), ranging from 3 to 182 utterances.

On average, children used 13 evaluations (SD = 14.58), ranging from 0 to 72 evaluations in their narratives.

On average, 27% (SD = 19.8) of the children’s narratives consisted of evaluative information.

Types of Evaluation

25%

19%51%

5%

Performance

Qualifier

Subjective

Causality

Types of Subjective Evaluation

14%

1%

4%

78%

3%Intentions

Compulsions

Cognition

Emotion

Physiological

Children’s evaluation diversity scores ranged from 0 - 12, with an average score of 5 (SD = 2.7).

Children’s narrative coherence ranged from 0 - 18 (M = 7, SD = 4.6).

Evaluation use was positively and significantly correlated with coherence (r = .77, p < .001).

Evaluation Diversity and Coherence

Total Evaluation and Coherence

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

Low Coherence High Coherence

Me

an

Pe

rce

nta

ge

F (1,71) = 36.43, p < .001

Diversity of Evaluation and Coherence

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

Low Coherence High Coherence

Div

ers

ity

Sc

ore

F (1,71) = 39.16, p < .001

Summary of Findings

Subjective evaluation was the most commonly used type of evaluation, in particular, references to characters’ emotions.

Evaluation was strongly correlated to overall narrative coherence.

Children who produced highly coherent narratives also produced highly evaluated narratives, and used more diverse types of evaluation than those children who produced less coherent narratives.

Discussion and Conclusion

Results show that evaluation might be an essential aspect of narrative coherence.

These results support findings from the few studies investigating Spanish-speaking Latin American children’s narratives.

This past work suggests that mainstream narrative frameworks do not adequately capture the overall structure of Latin American narratives (Shiro, 2003; Uccelli, in press).

The relation between coherence and evaluation in Latino narratives seems to extend beyond language and perhaps denotes a preferred cultural style of narrating.

Any Questions?