What, Where, How, When, Why?
The Construction of Causal Coherence in Children’s Narratives of Personal Experience
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17851/2237-2083.31.3.1530-1556Keywords:
children’s narrative development, coherence, causality, narratives of personal experience, Spanish-speaking childrenAbstract
The paper analyzes the construction of coherence, specifically causal coherence, in children’s narratives of personal experience. The study focused on the examination of causal relations and other types of connections established between the narrated events, as well as the presence of fragments of unrelated events. The corpus consists of 66 narratives produced by Argentinian Spanish-speaking children aged 3, 4 and 5 years. Narratives were obtained in individual interviews carried out in the kindergartens where children attended, located in urban-marginalized neighborhoods of Buenos Aires (Argentina). For the analysis of the narratives, we used a heuristic approach of an adapted version of Trabasso et al. Causal Network Narrative Model. The analysis combined qualitative and quantitative procedures. The results showed that children managed to connect the narrated events causally, temporally, and thematically. During this period, there predominated causal connections related to the physical (vs. mental) domain. The diversity of causal relations established within the same narrative increased with age. The narratives also contained unrelated events: breaks in the causal chain, dead-end events. The latter mostly referred to different components of narrative information (action, orientation, evaluation) that contribute to the coherence of the narrative in other non-causal dimensions. The results acquire special relevance for the study of children’s narrative production, considering the role of narrative in cognition, communication, socialization, and the transmission of culture.
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