Maman... Une histoire !

Abstract

24 five and seven-year old children from two social milieus (working and middle class) were told stories at home by their respective mothers and an unrelated adult. In the first session of the experiment, the mother successively told three stories to her child : Free, Elicited (by a series of drawings), and Reformulated. In the second session, an experimenter told two standard stories : Verbal and Verbal + Drawings. Mothers' stories and children 's recalls were analyzed in their lexical-syntactical and semantical aspects. Stories produced by working-class mothers contained fewer words, utterances, characters, episodes and semantical propositions than stories produced by middle- class mothers. No other formal or semantical difference between the two groups of mothers proved significant. There was no evidence of a differential adaptation of the mothers to the age of the children or to the nature of the adjunct material in the two social classes. Three factors : Social milieu, Age, and Story significantly influenced children's recall. The significant interactions Social milieu * Story and Age * Story showed that the difference between the children were greater for the Verbal + Drawings story than for the Verbal one. Finally, contrary to our expectation, the differences between the working and middle-class children did not vary as a function of age.