Mothers’ Questions During Personal Narrative and Book Reading Conversations Chavelis Rosario Mentor: Gigliana Melzi, Ph.D. New York University

Acknowledgements Gigliana Melzi, Ph.D. Child Language Research Team Adina Schick Joy Kennedy Dr. Sat HCS Staff

Mother-Child Storytelling Children as young as 2 ½ years old share stories with their parents and caregivers. The ways mothers share stories with their preschoolers influence the development of various skills. One main way in which mothers engage their children in storytelling is through elaboration, or the extent to which mothers encourage their children to share detailed and lengthy narratives. Elaboration is achieved in various ways: Mothers provide information spontaneously in the form of statements. Mothers request information through the use of questions. (Fivush,1991; McCabe & Peterson, 1991; Reese, Haden & Fivush, 1993)

Cultural Variations in Maternal Narrative Styles Through the asking of elaborative questions, mothers encourage their children to participate in telling of the story. However, culture influences the ways in which stories are shared with children, and in particular the extent and the manner in which elaboration is achieved. Research shows cultural differences in the forms of elaboration used by Spanish-speaking Latino and English-speaking European American mothers. Past research, however, has not examined closely all the types of elaborating questions mothers from different cultures use across storytelling contexts (i.e., personal narratives and book sharing).  When sharing personal narratives, Latino mothers ask many open-ended questions, whereas European American mothers use a combination of questions and statements.  When reading storybooks, Latino mothers ask few questions and mainly provide information through statements, whereas European American mothers use questions and statements.

Research Questions What type of questions do mothers ask their preschool-aged children during conversations? How do mothers’ question differ based on the conversational contact (i.e., personal narratives vs. book sharing)? How do mothers’ questions differ based on cultural background (i.e., Peruvian vs. European American)?

Participants Sixty-four mothers (32 Peruvian; 32 European American) and their preschool-aged children. All mothers were middle class and college educated. For the current study, I focused on one Peruvian another and one European American mother as they engaged in conversation with their 3-year-old sons. Peruvians (n = 32) European Americans (n = 32) 3-Year-Olds (n = 16) 5-Year-Olds (n = 16) 3-Year-Olds (n = 16) 5-Year-Olds (n = 16) M (SD) Children’ s Age (in months) (3.39)64.63 (3.61)42.31 (3.59)64.25 (3.91) Mothers’ Age (in years) (4.40)33.38 (4.33) (3.88) (4.84) Mothers’ Years of Education (1.89)16.81 (2.34)17.56 (2.48)16.19 (2.07)

Procedure Mothers were asked to engage in a conversation with their child about an event that occurred recently. Mothers were asked to share with their child a wordless book Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969) as they would naturally would. Personal NarrativeBook Reading

Coding and Analysis Type of Questions Open-ended questions Closed-ended questions Memory prompts Tag questions What are you doing? Did you go on a trip? Remember what we did last summer? We went to the park,, right?

Results

Personal Narratives In the personal narrative, the Peruvian mother asked 274 questions, and the European American mother asked 163 questions. Both mothers asked open-ended questions most frequently, and also asked a high percentage of closed-ended questions.

Book Reading Interaction In the book reading, the Peruvian mother asked 23 questions, and the European American mother asked 49 questions. The Peruvian mother mostly asked open-ended and tag questions, whereas the European American mother mostly asked open-ended and closed-ended questions.

Use of Questions across Narrative Contexts Both mothers asked more questions when sharing personal narratives with their children than during the book reading. In the personal narrative, however, the Peruvian mother asked more questions than the European American mother, whereas during the book reading the European American mother asked more questions than the Peruvian mother.

Discussion Results of the current study support findings of past research, showing that culture influences mothers’ storytelling styles. Specifically, results of this study suggest that the number and type of questions mothers ask their children during storytelling differs based on their culture and on the storytelling context. It is important for teachers and educators to be aware of these different storytelling styles so that they can build on them when children enter school.