Parental styles of narrative elicitation: effect on children's narrative structure and content

Abstract

Two contrastive studies of personal experience narration in two mother-child pairs are reported. The relationship between patterns of narrative elicitation and the children's developing narrative skill are investigated. Three sets of data were analysed: mother's utterances during mother-child elicitation, children's spontaneously provided contextual orientation in narratives elicited by a neutral researcher when the children were between 27 and 44 months of age, and the overall structure of the children's narratives at age 44 months. The two mothers differed substantially in the kinds of questions they asked: one focused on context (i.e., who, where, when, what and why), while the other emphasized event elaboration (i.e., what happened). The former's child was more likely to spontaneously include contextual orientation but showed less sophisticated plot structure. In contrast, the narratives of the second child showed better structural organization although she spontaneously included less contextual information. These results are discussed in terms of Vygotskian theory.