Spontaneous Narratives Research Articles

Measuring speech and language characteristics of effects of medications on cognition.

Many of the drugs prescribed for various diseases and syndromes, including chronic pain and epilepsy, significantly impair cognitive functioning with large individual variation. Language is a highly individualized and directly observable product of human cognition that is central to our everyday functioning. A system for automated language and speech analysis (SALSA) was developed that relies on using an automatic speech recognition engine (HTK 3.4) [Young et al. (2008)] to perform forced-alignment between the audio of spontaneous speech samples and their transcripts to measure a number of speech and language characteristics including fluency, speaking rate, change in fundametal frequency, and information content of spontaneous narratives. The system was piloted on a population of 14 healthy volunteers who participated in a randomized, placebo-controlled study of cognitive effects of an anti-epileptic medication (topiramate). Our preliminary results suggest that SALSA captures a number of fluency and lexical characteristics sensitive to the effects of topiramate, thus providing an objective mechanism to quantify the degree of cognitive impairment in individulas affected by medications. Our current results are consistent with prior work investigating speech and language correlates of mild cognitive impairment [Roark et al. (2007)] and fronto-temporal dementia [Pakhomov et al. (2009)]. [Work supported by a grant from the Univ. of Minnesota Academic Health Crt.]

Moral Dilemmas Film Task: a study of spontaneous narratives by individuals with autism spectrum conditions

People with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) have difficulties with mentalizing, empathy, and narrative comprehension. A new test of social and narrative cognition, the Moral Dilemmas Film Task, was developed to probe individuals' spontaneous understanding of naturalistic film scenes. Twenty-eight individuals with ASC and 28 neurotypical controls, matched for age, sex, and IQ, watched four short emotionally charged film clips each depicting a moral dilemma, and were asked to write about what they had seen. Individuals with ASC produced significantly shorter film-based narratives and showed a smaller bias for mental states over objects in their narratives than controls. A significant correlation was found between verbal IQ and the level of mentalizing in film narratives for the ASC group, but not the control group, while the reverse pattern was found with a measure of self-reported cognitive and affective empathy. These results suggest that to the extent that both groups succeed in viewing moral dilemmas in terms of mental content, they do so in different ways, with individuals with ASC using verbal scaffolding to increase their ability to draw meaning from social scenes. The well-established empathy deficit in ASC extends to spontaneous interpretation of moral dilemmas. This new film task has the potential to assay different aspects of how the social world is represented differently in ASC, including during moral comprehension.

Narrative Interaction in Family Dinnertime Conversations.

Reminiscing has been shown to be a critical conversational context for the development of autobiographical memory, self-concept, and emotional regulation (for a review, see Fivush, Haden, & Reese, 2006). Although much past research has examined reminiscing between mothers and their preschool children, very little attention has been given to family narrative interaction with older children. In the present study, we examined family reminiscing in spontaneous narratives that emerged during family dinnertime conversations. The results revealed that mothers contributed more to the narratives than did fathers in that they provided, confirmed, and negated more information, although fathers requested more information than mothers. In exploratory analyses, mothers' contributions to shared family narratives were found to be related to fewer internalizing and externalizing behaviors in their children, while fathers' contributions to individual narratives of day-today experiences were related to fewer internalizing and externalizing behaviors in their children. These results indicate that mothers and fathers may play different roles in narrative construction with their children, and there is some suggestion that these differences may also be related to children's behavioral adjustment.

COGNITIVE ROLE OF SPEECH PAUSES AND ALGORITHMIC CONSIDERATIONS FOR THEIR PROCESSING

This study investigates pausing strategies, focusing the attention on empty speech pauses. A cross-modal analysis (video and audio) of spontaneous narratives produced by male and female children and adults showed that a remarkable amount of empty speech pauses was used to signal new concepts in the speech flow and to segment discourse units such as clauses and paragraphs. Based on these results, an adaptive mathematical model for pause distribution was suggested, that exploits, as pause features, the absence of signal and/or the changes of energy over different acoustic dimensions strongly related to the auditory perception. These considerations inspired the formulation and the implementation of two pause detection procedures that proved to be more effective than the Likelihood Ratio Test (LRT) and Long-Term Spectral Divergence (LTSD) algorithms recently proposed in literature and applied for Voice Activity Detection (VAD).

Bilingual children with language impairment: A comparison with monolinguals and second language learners

The purpose of this study is twofold: (a) to examine whether English finite morphology has the potential to differentiate children with and without language impairment (LI) from Spanish-speaking backgrounds and different levels of English proficiency in comparison to Hispanic English speakers and (b) to investigate the extent to which children who are bilingual exhibit differences in their grammatical performance because of cross-linguistic influence from their first language. Seventy-one children between the ages of 4 years, 5 months and 6 years, 5 months were distributed into the following five groups: English as a first language (EL1) speakers with typical language development (TLD), EL1 speakers with LI, Spanish-English bilinguals with TLD, Spanish-English bilinguals with LI, and English as a second language (EL2) learners with TLD were compared on regular verb finiteness and nominative subject use using spontaneous narrative samples. The EL1 children with LI had significantly lower verb accuracy rates than the EL1 controls with TLD. Verb finiteness marking was also a significant discriminator for the bilinguals with LI. There was no evidence of cross-linguistic influence, however. The analysis indicated no significant differences between EL1 and bilingual children on subject or verb use. The EL2 group only presented difficulties with finite verb use. The typological differences between English and Spanish for overt subject use did not seem to affect the performance of either typical or atypical bilingual learners. The findings underscore the need for addressing language dominance in future bilingual studies.

Narrative, Imaginary Play, Art, and Self: Intersecting Worlds

This study documented the ways in which the spontaneous narratives of a focus group of young children reflected the ways in which these children constructed meaning about their world and their place in it. Participants were six kindergartners who engaged in extended episodes of imaginary, dramatic play and produced complex descriptive narratives of their visual texts (i.e., drawings, paintings and three-dimensional objects). Data collected included transcripts of videotapes and audiotapes of children’s narrative talk, field notes, memos and visual text artefacts. Three themes emerged from the qualitative analysis of the data: (1) Engendering emerged from observations of the ways in which children’s narratives focused on self or I and revealed the ways in which children construct (engender) their identities as moral, social, cultural and gendered beings; (2) Crossing texts and re-configuration emerged from the ways in which children negotiate their roles (self) with others, that is, the children begin to see themselves in relation to others (re-configuring the I to We); and, (3) Re-construction/re-imagination emerged from the ways in which children use narrative to grapple with abstract scientific, philosophical and moral questions, that is, through narrative interactions with others, children build hypothesis about themselves and their world which, during subsequent narrative interactions, are challenged and re-formulated (re-imagined). The narratives created by these children revealed the complex journey they take in the process of forming a self-identity.

Telling the story of theory of mind: Deaf and hearing children's narratives and mental state understanding

Theory of mind (ToM) was examined in late‐signing deaf children in two studies by using standard tests and measures of spontaneous talk about inner states of perception, affect and cognition during storytelling. In Study 1, there were 21 deaf children aged 6 to 11 years and 13 typical‐hearing children matched with the deaf by chronological age. In Study 2, there were 17 deaf children aged 6 to 12 years and 17 typical‐hearing preschoolers aged 4 to 5 years who were matched with the deaf by ToM test performance. In addition to replicating the consistently reported finding of poor performance on standard false belief tests by late‐signing deaf children, significant correlations emerged in both studies between deaf children's ToM test scores and their spontaneous narrative talk about imaginative cognition (e.g. ‘pretend’). In Study 2, with a new set of purpose‐built pictures that evoked richer and more complex mentalistic narration than the published picture book of Study 1, results of multiple regression analyses showed that children's narrative talk about imaginative cognition was uniquely important, over and above hearing status and talking of other kinds of mental states, in predicting ToM scores. The same was true of children's elaborated narrative talk using utterances that either spelt out thoughts, explained inner states or introduced contrastives. In addition, results of a Guttman scalogram analysis in Study 2 suggested a consistent sequence in narrative and standard test performance by deaf and hearing children that went from (1) narrative mention of visible (affective or perceptual) mental states only, along with FB failure, to (2) narrative mention of cognitive states along with (1), to (3) elaborated narrative talk about inner states along with (2), and finally to (4) simple and elaborated narrative talk about affective/perceptual and cognitive states along with FB test success. Possible explanations for this performance ordering, as well as for the observed correlations in both studies between ToM test scores and narrative variables, were considered.

The multimodal mediation of power in the discourses of preschool story designers

The analyses offered in this paper attempt to elucidate some of the complex strategies that very young children use to assert power in socio-narrative activity. The paper focuses on three child storytellers in one preschool classroom who recruited verbal, visual, gestural, actional, and narrative mediating elements to carry out multimodal discourses. The children’s spontaneous narratives made use of various combinations of color, size and placement of drawings, as well as segmental and suprasegmental language features, written language, gesture, and silence. These elements carried out each narrator’s moment-to-moment design of the discourse by working in service of a switch-off between signs via the various narrative elements of the fictions that the children were creating. Simultaneously, the children played out real-world social relationships through these fictional narratives in successive attempts to invade—or at least touch—corners of each other’s realities. The analysis includes a textual component as well as visual representations that relate the exemplified interactions to the discourses of which they are part. These interactions and discourses are also linked with the notion of macro-narrative and the role of less visible mediating elements drawn from the history of the child’s relationships.

Using Māori English in New Zealand

This paper reviews research relating to Māori varieties of English in New Zealand. Research on linguistic features of Māori English is first summarized, and then some of the ways in which Māori and Pākehā conversationalists use English differently in relation to a number of speech functions are explored. The structural features reviewed include phonological, syntactic, lexical, and semantic features of Māori English. Pragmatic features are also considered, including the distinctive high-rising terminal intonation contour, the pragmatic tag eh , and similarities and differences between Pākehā and Māori in the use of verbal feedback in English conversation. Some features of the structure of spontaneous narratives told by Māori and Pākehā are discussed, as well as differences in the way humor is used by Māori and Pākehā New Zealanders in relaxed conversations. The paper concludes by indicating some of the most obvious areas for further research.

Brain network interactions in auditory, visual and linguistic processing

In the paper, we discuss the importance of network interactions between brain regions in mediating performance of sensorimotor and cognitive tasks, including those associated with language processing. Functional neuroimaging, especially PET and fMRI, provide data that are obtained essentially simultaneously from much of the brain, and thus are ideal for enabling one to assess interregional functional interactions. Two ways to use these types of data to assess network interactions are presented. First, using PET, we demonstrate that anterior and posterior perisylvian language areas have stronger functional connectivity during spontaneous narrative production than during other less linguistically demanding production tasks. Second, we show how one can use large-scale neural network modeling to relate neural activity to the hemodynamically-based data generated by fMRI and PET. We review two versions of a model of object processing – one for visual and one for auditory objects. The regions comprising the models include primary and secondary sensory cortex, association cortex in the temporal lobe, and prefrontal cortex. Each model incorporates specific assumptions about how neurons in each of these areas function, and how neurons in the different areas are interconnected with each other. Each model is able to perform a delayed match-to-sample task for simple objects (simple shapes for the visual model; tonal contours for the auditory model). We find that the simulated electrical activities in each region are similar to those observed in nonhuman primates performing analogous tasks, and the absolute values of the simulated integrated synaptic activity in each brain region match human fMRI/PET data. Thus, this type of modeling provides a way to understand the neural bases for the sensorimotor and cognitive tasks of interest.

Variable Subject Presence in ASL Narratives

This article examines variation between null and overt subject pronouns in ASL. In ASL, information about the subject is sometimes provided through morphology. Certain verbs allow changes in form (i.e., in their use of space) that indicate the person and/or number of the subject. In the case of �plain verbs� (Padden 1988), however, the verb form itself includes no information about the subject. Although we might expect plain verbs to require separate manual subjects, they also show variable subject presence. In this study, based on spontaneous narratives produced by signers ranging from 16 to 84 years of age, we use multivariate analysis to examine the behavior of subjects of plain verbs. All possible sites of pronominal subjects occurring with plain verbs were coded for a number of factors, including person and number, switch reference, sentence type, age, and gender. We also coded for whether the token occurred within constructed action or dialogue or within utterances marked by obvious English influence. Overall, results indicate that ASL subject pronoun presence with plain verbs is systematic and constrained by a range of factors that exhibit remarkable similarity to constraints found in studies of spoken languages. Results for age, however, need to be interpreted in light of the social history of the U.S. Deaf community.

Narratives in Two Languages: Assessing Performance of Bilingual Children

Studies with monolingual children have demonstrated the significance of children’s narrative development for the acquisition of literacy skills. However, little is known about the narrative skills of Spanish-speaking children who are in the process of becoming bilingual. These children may exhibit various levels of competence in the first (L1) and second language (L2). For some of these children, their English narrative skills may not be sufficient to facilitate their literacy development. This study examined the narrative performance of 33 typically developing bilingual children in both (Spanish) L1 and English (L2), using story recall and story comprehension tasks. Most children exhibited greater narrative recall and story comprehension in English, and some children showed significantly poorer performance on the narrative recall than on a spontaneous narrative production task for one of the languages. The data underscored the notion of bilingualism as a continuum of proficiencies. Narrative assessment tasks in L1 and L2, which appear to be comparable, may not pose similar processing demands on a bilingual speaker.

The Narrative Construction of Differing Conceptions of the Person in the Development of Young Children's Social Understanding

The study reported here used a systematic interpretive analysis of young children's spontaneous narratives to investigate the development of their conceptions of the person. We argue that currently predominant approaches to this subject in social cognition research are insufficiently sociocultural and need to be broadened and reoriented (a) to capture the social (rather than purely mentalistic) dimension inherent in any conception of the person, (b) to examine how the development of children's conception of the person involves the selective appropriation of culturally elaborated models of personhood, and therefore (c) to recognize that children develop and employ different conceptions of the person, in ways that are socioculturally patterned. The study examined a body of 598 stories generated by 30 preschool children (5 girls and 5 boys in 3 age cohorts: 3s, 4s, and 5s) through a storytelling and story-acting practice that was a regular (but voluntary) part of their classroom activities for the entire school year. Analyses indicated that in their narratives the girls and boys constructed and elaborated two distinctive gender-related conceptions of the person: girls a socially embedded and interdependent person, who becomes increasingly individuated and self-consciously responsible; boys a separate and agonistic person, who increasingly becomes a stable, autonomous, and self-conscious mental agent. Typologies are presented to delineate and compare the developmental pathways of these two gender-related models of personhood. Some implications for early childhood education are also discussed.

Formation des enseignants : l'apprentissage réflexif à partir de la biographie et du contexte

Reflection has been a key concept in the literature on teacher education for almost 20 years now, but both in theory and practice it is often reduced to a technical issue. Starting from a concept of teacher education as a process of lifelong professional development, the author argues for a broader and deeper concept of reflection. The broad concept not only acknowledges the technical aspects of knowledge and skill in teaching, but also takes into consideration the inevitable moral, political ana emotional aspects. The deep concept of reflection not only looks at changes in teaching behaviour, but focuses even more on changing the ideas, concepts and representations in the teachers' mind. This new concept of reflection is further linked to the so-called "narrative-biographical approach". The spontaneous narrative accounts by teachers about the experiences in their "careers" as pupils, students and teachers constitute a powerful entry to better understand their actions and reflections, as well as to influence them during teacher education and in-service training.

Narrating Self and Disability: Latino Mothers' Construction of Identities vis-à-vis Their Child with Special Needs

We examine how 150 Latino mothers of young children with developmental disabilities use narratives to express and create self-understandings vis-à-vis their child. The purpose is twofold: (a) to introduce narrative as a tool that people use to make sense of disability, and (b) to demonstrate how these mothers draw on cultural beliefs and the narrative form to construct meanings of self in relationship to disability. An analysis of spontaneous narratives of self and disability reveal that the majority of mothers portrayed themselves as good mothers in line with larger cultural notions, and viewed their child as bringing about positive transformations in their lives. We end by suggesting ways that narrative analysis could be used in future research and practice.

Iconic prosody and information in spontaneous oral narrative

The information interchange on cognitive categories of the mental representation of referents (concepts) interrelated with prosodic marking (levels of phonological prominence) have been studied. Speakers actualize a limited amount of information inactivating backwards. These cognitive processes appear in three states of the referents: activation, semi-activation, and inactivation. In activation, a concept would be focalized in actual stream of consciousness. In semi-activation, the information is situated in a peripheral zone of consciousness: the concept was already activated. In inactivation, the concept would be activated in the hearer’s conscience for the first time. These states were analyzed through data extracted from spontaneous narrative discourses obtained from an Argentinean Spanish speaker. The iconicity of prosodic prominences, a correlation between the phonetic encoding and the mental status of information weight, was explored acoustically. Measurements were made through F0 data normalized by a logarithmic z-score transformation calculated in the highest value of an item classified among one of the three states. Findings were similar to previous research on semi-spontaneous materials [G. Toledo, 16th International Congress on Acoustics, 4aSC1]: lower prominences were the marking of activation and semi-activation, and higher prominences were the feature of inactivation, i.e., a degree of prosodic iconicity.

Story Voices: The Use of Reported Speech in 10-12-year-olds' Spontaneous Narratives

Five spontaneous narratives from 10 12-year-olds conversations are analysed to show how they contribute to the children s ongoing construction of knowledge and identity. A Labovian analysis of the evaluative function of narrative is supplemented with ethnographic research and Bakhtin and Volosinov s work, to demonstrate more dynamic and complex processes in children s talk. It is argued that the children s use of reported speech drives both the referential and the evaluative functions of their narratives. The children s reproduction and framing of other people s and their own voices enables them to explore the different perspectives of characters within the story, and also to comment on and evaluate these perspectives. The stories are orientated towards listeners and previous conversational turns, and they also set up intertextual connections with other stories and other conversations, to create additional connotations and layers of meaning. Children s narratives revisit particular themes and preoccupatio...

Using Centering to Relax Gricean Informational Constraints on Discourse Anaphoric Noun Phrases

In this paper, I explore the interaction among several factors argued to constrain discourse anaphoric expressions: the local centering context consisting of successive pairs of utterances; the informational content of a discourse anaphoric expression relative to the set of entities that need to be discriminated; the choice among different kinds of discriminating information; and the global attentional state that derives from the structure of an entire discourse. Specifications for the model are based on analysis of such factors in a corpus of spontaneous oral narratives. Then I use a reserved set of narratives for evaluating a simplified version of the generation model. The model integrates informational constraints, based on Dale's (1992) model, with centering. I show that by integrating centering constraints, the integrated model can account for two types of violation of informational constraints: informationally inadequate pronouns where the pronoun realizes the current backward-looking center, and certain full noun phrases in utterances where the backward-looking center is not overtly mentioned, and use of a pronoun would produce garden-path effects. I argue that for generation, centering constraints take precedence over informational constraints. The evaluation tests three conditions: informational constraints (1) with no focus structure imposed on the discourse, (2) with an empirically derived global focus structure, and (3) with global focus plus centering. Results improve dramatically under each subsequent condition.

L.A. stories: aggression in preschoolers' spontaneous narratives after the riots of 1992.

64 inner-city preschoolers' spontaneous story narratives that were examined directly after the Los Angeles riots of 1992 were compared with narratives told by a matched comparison group of 128 children living in other U.S. cities who had no direct exposure to the riots. Narratives were coded for length, complexity, overall thematic content, character behavior in the stories, number of aggressive words, and story outcome. Children were given language and pre-academic skill assessments, their classroom behavior was observed and teachers rated children's social competence. Results indicated that there were significant group differences in the story narratives. Children who were directly exposed to the riots told more narratives with aggressive thematic content, aggressive words, unfriendly figures who engaged in physical aggression, and mastery of situations with aggression than did the comparison group of children who had no direct exposure to the riots. The findings suggest that children's narratives reflected their exposure to the violence and their expression of that experience.

L. A. Stories: Aggression in Preschoolers' Spontaneous Narratives after the Riots of 1992

L. A. Stories: Aggression in Preschoolers' Spontaneous Narratives after the Riots of 1992