When mothers turn a visual story into a verbal one for their children: Previewing helps with the telling, conversing, and remembering

Abstract

Children’s ability to recall text stories coherently and the ways in which this skill unfolds in the context of parent-child interaction have been receiving increasing research attention over the last several years. However, mothers’ ability to turn a purely visual story into a verbal one and the implications for their children’s independent story recall have not been studied. The present experiment investigated how mothers constructed a verbal story from a wordless storybook with their preschool children. A significant aim was to examine whether the narrative structure of mothers’ story productions may be affected by previewing. We also analysed the effects of this between-subjects manipulation on the narrative structure of children’s independent story recall. Results indicated that previewing helped mothers to tell more coherent stories and helped them to invite their children to collaborate in the story construction. Children of mothers who previewed the story also had superior cued story recall. Implications and constraints of the data are discussed.