Abstract
We tell stories to entertain our audience and to explain our actions. Stories transmit cultural and individual traditions, values, and moral codes. They explicate observable actions and events in terms of unobservable goals and motives, thoughts and emotions. Stories manipulate place and time to present temporal and causal sequences that are extraordinary. Storytelling is one of the first uses of language (Halliday, 1975; Keenan, 1974; Weir, 1960) and one of the most skilled (Lord, 1960; Watson-Gegeo & Boggs, 1977). Storytelling and understanding are verbal arts that children gradually master between 2 and 10 years of age. In developing narrative competence, children learn to produce and comprehend causally and temporally structured plots that are organized around a variety of themes and involve a myriad of characters.
-
(1)
Froggie goes crash in the water, bumps his head. And he fell in dirt. He cried. Then he bumped his head off. (2-year-old boy, Pitcher & Prelinger, 1963, p. 34)
-
(2)
Once there was an alligator who lived in New York City and all the children were his friends and he wouldn’t hurt anybody. And one day he got a note saying, “Mr. Alligator, I hate you.” And Mr. Alligator always kept feeling bad because everybody liked him. But while he was walking through the grocery store he saw little girl writing a note. The note said, “Mr. Alligator, I hate you.” And he asked the little girl why she hated him. The girl said, “Because you’re taking my friends away from me. They always want to play with you.” Mr. Alligator said, “Why don’t you play with me too?” And she said, “My mother doesn’t like alligators and won’t let me. She thinks they’ll bite.” So Mr. Alligator went to the little girl’s house and said to her mother, “I’m not going to bite anybody.” And the little girl’s mother said, “All right, I can see that.” The alligator said, “Good, so everybody else can play with me.” (10-year-old boy, Sutton-Smith, 1981, p. 290)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abrahms, D. M. (1977). Conflict resolution in children’s storytelling: An application of Erikson’s theory and the conflict enculturation model. Doctoral dissertation, Columbia University.
Ames, L. B. (1966). Children’s stories. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 73, 337–396.
Applebee, A. N. (1978). The child’s concept of story: Ages two to seventeen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bloom, L., Lahey, M., Hood, L., Lifter, K., & Fiess, K. (1980). Complex sentences: Acquisition of syntactic connectives and the semantic relations they encode. Journal of Child Language, 7, 23 5–261.
Botvin, G. J., & Sutton-Smith, B. (1977). The development of structural complexity in children’s fantasy narratives. Developmental Psychology, 13, 377–388.
Cuff, E. C., & Hustler, D. (1981). Stories and story time in the infant classroom. In P. French & M. MacLure, Adult-child conversation. New York: St. Martins.
Dundes, A. (1964). The morphology of North American Indian folktales. Helsinki: FF Communications.
Erikson, E. (1951). Childhood and society. New York: Norton.
Gardner, H. (1978). From Melvin to Melville: On the relevance to aesthetics of recent research on story comprehension. In S. S. Madeja (Ed.), The arts, cognition, and basic skills. St. Louis: CEMREL.
Gardner, R. A. (1971). Therapeutic communication with children: The mutual storytelling technique. New York: Science House.
Graesser, A. C. (1981). Prose Comprehension Beyond the Word. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1975). Learning how to mean: Explorations in the development of language. New York: Elsevier.
Hood, L., & Bloom, L. (1979). What, when, and how about why: A longitudinal study of expressions of causality in the language development of two-year-old children. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, No. 181.
Johnson, J. R. (1982). Narratives: A new look at communication problems in older language-disordered children. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in the Schools, 13, 144–155.
Keenan, E. (1974). Conversational competence in children. Journal of Child Language, 1, 163–183.
Kemper, S. (1981). The event chain analysis of texts (Tech. Rep. No. 81–12). Lawrence: The University of Kansas.
Kemper, S. (1982). Filling in the missing links. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 21, 99–107.
Kemper, S. (1983). Measuring the inference load of a text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 75, 391–401.
Kemper, S., Otalvaro, N., Estill, R. B., & Schadler, M. (in press). Questions and facts and inferences. In A. C. Graesser & J. B. Black (Eds.). The Psychology of Questions. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.
Kernan, K. (1977). Semantic and expressive elaboration in children’s narratives. In S. Ervin-Tripp & C. Mitchell-Kernan (Eds.), Child discourse. New York: Academic.
Labov, W., & Waletzky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In J. Helan (Ed.), Essays on the verbal and visual arts. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Leondar, B. (1977). Hatching plots: Gensis of storymaking. In D. Perkins & B. Leondar (Eds.), The arts and cognition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Linde, C. (in press). The life story: A temporally discontinuous discourse type. In H. W. Dechert & M. Raupach (Eds.), Discourse production. Norwood: Ablex.
Lord, A. B. (1973). The singer of tales. New York: Altheneum.
Mandler, J. M., & Johnson, N. J. (1977). Remembrance of things parsed: Story structure and recall. Cognitive Psychology, 9, 111–151.
Maranda, E., & Maranda, K. (1971). Structural models in folklore and transformational essays. The Hague: Mouton.
Omanson, R. C., Warren, W. H., & Trabasso, T. (1978). Goals, inferential comprehension, and recall of stories by children. Discourse Processes, 1, 355–372.
Pitcher, E. G., & Prelinger, E. (1963). Children tell stories: An analysis of fantasy. New York: International University Press.
Propp, V. (1968). The morphology of the folktale. Bloomington: Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics.
Rumelhart, D. E. (1975). Notes on a schema for stories. In D. G. Bobrow & A. Collins (Eds.), Representation and understanding: Studies in cognitive science. New York: Academic.
Sachs, H. (1974). On the analysability of stories by children. In R. Turner (Ed.), Ethnomethodology. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Schank, R., & Abelson, R. (1977). Scripts, plans, goals, and understanding: An inquiry into human knowledge structures. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Stein, N. L., & Glenn, C. G. (1977). A developmental study of children’s construction of stories. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, New Orleans.
Stein, N. L., & Glenn, C. G. (1979). An analysis of story comprehension in elementary school children. In R. O. Freedle (Ed.), New directions in discourse processing (Vol. 2). Norwood: Ablex.
Sutton-Smith, B. (1975). The importance of the storytaker: An investigation of the imaginative life. Urban Review, 8, 82–95.
Sutton-Smith, B. (1981). The folkstories of children. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Sutton-Smith, B., & Abrahms, D. M. (1978). Psychosexual material in the stories told by children. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 7, 521–43.
Umiker-Sebeok, D. J. (1979). Preschool children’s intraconversational narratives. Journal of Child Language, 6, 91–109.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Warren, W. H., Nicholas, P. W., & Trabasso, T. (1979). Event chains and inferences in understanding narratives. In R. O. Freedle (Ed.), New directions in discourse processing (Vol. 2). Norwood: Ablex.
Watson-Gegeo, K. A., & Boggs, S. T. (1977). From verbal play to talk story: The role of routines in speech events among Hawaiian children. In S. Ervin-Tripp & C. Mitchell-Kernan (Eds.), Child discourse. New York: Academic.
Weir, R. (1960). Language in the crib. The Hague: Mouton.
Winer, B.J. (1971). Statistical principles in experimental design. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1984 Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kemper, S. (1984). The Development of Narrative Skills: Explanations and Entertainments. In: Kuczaj, S.A. (eds) Discourse Development. Springer Series in Cognitive Development. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-9508-9_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-9508-9_5
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4613-9510-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-4613-9508-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive