Spontaneous Storytelling Research Articles

Japanese two-year-olds’ spontaneous participation in storytelling activities as social interaction

The present study observes the very early stages of children’s storytelling activities in order to investigate how children younger than 3 years old participate in this socially complex activity at a time when both their linguistic and their interactional repertoires are still less than fully developed. Child language acquisition research has reported that children become skilful with narratives around 4 or 5 years of age, and suggests that younger children’s ability to talk about past experience is relatively underdeveloped before that time, when they are still generally poor at providing orientating information about who, when and where. Drawing upon a corpus of naturally occurring interactions in Japanese, my analysis of children’s spontaneous storytelling reveals that despite their limited linguistic resources, 2-year-old children’s participation in storytelling activities are skilfully organized into particular participation frameworks by using the various resources that are presently available to them. This paper thus argues that children’s competence in supplying specific information in their storytelling is not just a function of their developmental trajectory, but is also heavily influenced by the interactional environment that they find themselves in and motivated by the knowledge statuses of themselves and others. It shows conclusively, too, that some 2-year-old children are already quite capable in initiating or in participating in storytelling activity without the adult provision of a scaffolding for content.

Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir by Amy Tan

Reviewed by: Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir by Amy Tan Jian Sun (孙坚) (bio) Amy Tan, Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir. New York: HarperCollins, 2017, 358 pp. isbn 978-0-06-231929-6 (HB). $28.99. Amy Tan’s Where the Past Begins, unique among her writings, offers a rare insight into the process of her writing as well as her becoming a writer. In the book, Tan explains how her past affects her writings and reveals the truths and inspirations that underlie her extraordinary fictions. Through spontaneous storytelling, Tan shows how her fluid fictional state of mind triggers her near-forgotten memories and at the same time becomes the emotional source of her novels. The memoir is originally suggested by her editor (Daniel Halpern) that she writes a book based on the e-mails exchanges between both of them. To fulfill this, Tan “plow[s] into the e-mails that might be usable” (7). Instead of writing one totally based on their e-mails, Tan has plunged into the history of her family and has successfully reconstructed “the past even before [her] birth” (1). Consequently, we, the readers, together with Tan, the author, are given the opportunity to explore the unpleasant stories of her family back in China and those of the Tans’ in the United States. These include the short and tragic (even doubtful) life of a grandmother. Tan, judging from a family [End Page 376] photo, believes that her grandmother was once a prostitute. In addition, there is the tormented life of her mother who was unable to suffer her abusive husband and who, against the then societal practice, fell in love with Tan’s father and later immigrated to America. The story of struggle-for-survival of her parents in the States intervened by the heartbreaking losses in the same year of her father and brother, and the troubled yet love-filled stories between Tan, the daughter, and her suicide-haunted mother. Obviously, Where the Past Begins conveys to the audience that Tan’s family plays an essential role in the making of the writer. Among all the factors leading to the rise of the writer, three should not be neglected: the source of her imagination; her personality; and most importantly, her traumatic childhood indissolubly tied to her mother, a difficult, moody woman who had an indelible influence on her daughter Amy Tan, the author. 1 Tan firstly explores how her imagination—of the greatest importance for a writer—was cultivated unconsciously when she practiced drawing and playing the piano from an early age. In some ways, drawing is very much like fiction writing, both of them requires one to be “curious, observant and inquisitive” (20). Tan has the habit of wonderment, which prompts her to wonder over what she is seeing and helps in removing usual assumptions. Tan regard writing as a process to discover truths that lie submerged under the factual surface and writing as a process of revealing human nature. She contends: “in writing fiction, the truth I seek is not a factual or scientific truth. It has to do with human nature, which is tied to nature. It is about those things that are not apparent on the surface” (21). Naturally, in writing a story, she attempts “to find a way to capture all its facets and conundrums” and tries “to put down what feels true” (21). Her drawing proclivities in childhood actually increase her aptitude for the visual and emotional imagery in her writing. The way she draws shares similarities with writing. Both require the presentation of what is seen on paper. “When I see a visual image in my mind as a scene, I try to capture it in words . . . and I do constant revisions as l try to capture it more clearly.” She wants to “bring forth what [she] cannot see, what is not there” and in writing she allows “[her] brain to circumnavigate all the possibilities” (21). Music has become Tan’s best companion when she writes, as music can help her concentrate on writing. When she listens to a piece of music, she [End Page 377] will see a story in the...

Neural substrates of spontaneous narrative production in focal neurodegenerative disease

Conversational storytelling integrates diverse cognitive and socio-emotional abilities that critically differ across neurodegenerative disease groups. Storytelling patterns may have diagnostic relevance and predict anatomic changes. The present study employed mixed methods discourse and quantitative analyses to delineate patterns of storytelling across focal neurodegenerative disease groups, and to clarify the neuroanatomical contributions to common storytelling characteristics. Transcripts of spontaneous social interactions of 46 participants (15 behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), 7 semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA), 12 Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and 12 healthy older normal controls (NC)) were analyzed for storytelling frequency and characteristics, and videos of the interactions were rated for patients' level of social attentiveness. Compared to controls, svPPAs told more stories and autobiographical stories, and perseverated on aspects of self during the interaction, whereas ADs told fewer autobiographical stories than NCs. svPPAs and bvFTDs were rated as less attentive to social cues. Aspects of storytelling were related to diverse cognitive and socio-emotional functions, and voxel-based anatomic analysis of structural magnetic resonance imaging revealed that temporal organization, narrative evaluations patterns, and social attentiveness correlated with atrophy corresponding to known intrinsic connectivity networks, including the default mode, limbic, salience, and stable task control networks. Differences in spontaneous storytelling among neurodegenerative groups elucidated diverse cognitive, socio-emotional, and neural contributions to narrative production, with implications for diagnostic screening and therapeutic intervention.

Relaciones entre escuela y familias inmigrantes. Estudio de un caso

Este artículo versa sobre la participación de padres inmigrantes en los colegios a los que asisten sus hijos. Su valor o aportación reside en incluir la narración audiovisual en la relación entre la escuela y la comunidad. Exponemos los primeros resultados del proyecto que investiga la naturaleza de las relaciones entre un grupo de estas familias con la institución educativa, promovidas por narraciones verbales y fotográficas grupales, iniciadas y apoyadas por<br />reuniones en las aulas del colegio y continuadas en sus contextos familiar y social.<br />Durante el curso 2011/12, trabajamos con las familias de un grupo de 4º de EP del CEIP Jaime Vera de Madrid, España, que tiene un 89% de estudiantes inmigrantes. Proporcionamos reuniones de discusión sobre las historias que pretendían narrar. Además de la observación y del registro en audio de sus manifestaciones espontáneas en las sesiones de narración, se hicieron entrevistas informales a las familias participantes para dar validez al estudio.<br />Las familias dieron su aprobación para que dichas sesiones fueran grabadas. <br />Entre las conclusiones de este estudio cabe señalar que la influencia del director y de la tutora ha sido fundamental en la participación de las familias. Hemos comprobado que hay contraste entre el conocimiento superficial que manifestaron tener unos padres de otros al principio<br />del año escolar, y la relación más estrecha que existió entre ellos al final. Hay que mencionar el papel relevante que han tenido las preguntas y cuestiones realizadas sobre el contenido narrado para mejorar el conocimiento mutuo de los participantes.

A corpus-based discourse analysis of conversational storytelling in Chinese adults

This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of the nature of spontaneous storytelling activity in daily conversation. Based on both the structural and interactional views of oral narrative, we propose to add another perspective, arguing that conversational storytelling is a three-dimensional construct, with narrative, interactive and cognitive functions performed simultaneously in the context of social communication. The study has recorded 15 pieces of casual talks by 11 adult native speakers of Chinese and extracted 87 stories altogether. From the data, we observe that in the process of conversational narratives, (1) narration is achieved interactively, with the narrative sequence, story structure and even tellership all framed by communicative needs; (2) interactional activities, such as self-image building, interpersonal work and social-cultural practice are engaged in; (3) intersubjective social cognition is also achieved as personal experience becomes shared and cooperatively interpreted.

The Edinburgh Speech Production Facility’s articulatory corpus of spontaneous dialogue.

The EPSRC‐funded Edinburgh Speech Production is built around two synchronized Carstens AG500 electromagnetic articulographs (EMAs) in order to capture articulatory/acoustic data from spontaneous dialogue. An initial articulatory corpus was designed with two aims. The first was to elicit a range of speech styles/registers from speakers, and therefore provide an alternative to fully scripted corpora. The second was to extend the corpus beyond monologue, by using tasks that promote natural discourse and interaction. A subsidiary driver was to use dialects from outwith North America: dialogues paired up a Scottish English and a Southern British English speaker. Tasks. Monologue: Story reading of “Comma Gets a Cure” [Honorof et al. (2000)], lexical sets [Wells (1982)], spontaneous story telling, diadochokinetic tasks. Dialogue: Map tasks [Anderson et al. (1991)], “Spot the Difference” picture tasks [Bradlow et al. (2007)], story‐recall. Shadowing of the spontaneous story telling by the second participant. Each dialogue session includes approximately 30 min of speech, and there are acoustics‐only baseline materials. We will introduce the corpus and highlight the role of articulatory production data in helping provide a fuller understanding of various spontaneous speech phenomena by presenting examples of naturally occurring covert speech errors, accent accommodation, turn taking negotiation, and shadowing.

Professional storytelling in clinical dental anatomy teaching

The aim of the present work was to see if storytelling in a clinical dental anatomy course would increase student satisfaction. We enhanced teaching by spontaneous storytelling in problem-based learning, in half of the third-year dentistry class. At the end of the course, we administered an anonymous questionnaire to the students in the class, consisting of 12 questions that students had to answer on a Likert scale of 1-5. An overall satisfaction score was obtained and we used a linear mixed model to compare differences in satisfaction between the two groups, with "group" as the fixed effect. We also conducted an exploratory factor analysis of the responses to investigate whether there were distinct constructs within the data. Overall satisfaction is high, with students "with stories" having higher satisfaction than those "without stories." The former group consistently gives higher satisfaction scores, regardless of which question is being asked. Factor analysis provides evidence that storytelling nurtures reflective learning, while students work on their clinical anatomy problems.

Perceived Stress and Stress Projected into the Spontaneous Storytelling of Two Groups of Fourth Grade Children

The purpose of this descriptive correlation study was to describe stress levels in fourth grade children from two geographic locations: an inner city recreation club and a suburban parochial school. The use of spontaneous storytelling and a life events questionnaire provided information about the stress being experienced by the children. This article presents story themes and stressful life events of interest to adult caregivers helping children cope with stressful experiences.

Individual differences in the signed communication of deaf children.

Individual differences within the spontaneous storytelling samples of 15 school-aged deaf children are examined. The children had all been exposed to manually coded English at home and at school for some time, but their language samples differentially showed characteristics more consistent with either English or Sign Language. Four descriptive factors are defined to compare and group the samples. Relationships among background information on the children and their language descriptor scores are also described.