1. Narratives: Expressing temporal and causal relations
Aylin Küntay
PSYC 453
Meeting 13

2. Narrative– what is it? Conversational Elicited
Researcher asks a participant to tell or retell a story based on a series of pictures, a film, a previously heard story, a personal story, etc.
Referential vs. evaluative dimension

3. Frog Story Method
a 24-page wordless book (picture-book) was used to elicit narratives from Turkish and Japanese speakers of different ages
part of a large collaborative project, the ‘frog story’ project
the story is about a boy, a dog, and their pet frog
in order to tell the story successfully, a speaker must infer and convey aspects that are not available in the pictures
part of this involves providing motivations and causal explanations for the characters’ actions

4. Frog Story
Volunteer?
Try the Flip cam

5. Expression of temporal relations
He looked for the frog in his room, then he left
The deer carried the boy and threw him off the cliff

6. Expression of causal relations in narrative
Nilgün thought that Can was sad because he didn’t get the red bicycle he wanted for his birthday
The bees went up the tree to escape from the barking dog
It was so cold that even the lake was frozen.
The owl came out and the dog was scared, so he fell off the tree

7. What exactly is ToM?
ability to attribute beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions to the self and others in order to explain and predict behavior

8. Küntay and Nakamura (2004) a cross-linguistic and developmental study
Study 1: Use of causal language in elicited picture-book narratives in Japanese and Turkish
Küntay and Nakamura (2004)
a cross-linguistic and developmental study

9. Participants: Number of participants for each language and age group
Japanese
Turkish
4-year 17 16
5-year 20
7-year 19 15
9-year
Adults

10. Purpose
Küntay and Nakamura (2004) examines evaluative language in narrative in general
strategies used by narrators to convey their own perspective on the narrated events and to engage the audience
today: focus on causal connectives, which is one type of evaluative device
causal connectors are used to express (implicit) relationships between events in a narrative
Example: ‘A squirrel came out so (the boy) is crying.’ (4;6, Japanese male)

11. Questions addressed
how and in what functions do speakers of different languages use causal connectives in constructing oral narratives?
any similarities and differences between Turkish, Japanese, and English (English data from Bamberg & Damrad-Frye, 1992)?

12. Japanese, Turkish, and English data: % of clauses with causal connectors
Age 4 5 7 9
Adults
Japanese
2.8
1.0
3.9
2.0
3.7
Turkish
0.5
1.3
1.4
3.0
English
4.7
6.9
Language

13. English data (Bamberg and Damrad-Frye)
find many references to characters’ mental and emotive states used in conjunction with causal connectives in the 9-year-old and adult frog stories
English-speaking children tended to use causal connectors in clusters with references to mental states (40% in 9-yr-olds)
Example 1. and the dog was scared
cause all the bees were coming to get the dog (5-yr-old, English)
Example 2. and then the boy was mad
cause he knew
that the frog went away (9-yr-old, English)

14. Japanese, Turkish, and English data: % of causal connectors used in conjunction with mental state terms
Age 4 5 7 9
Adults
Japanese 21 29 19 15
Turkish 27 25 20
English 40
Language
The boy flipped over because the bees came (7-year-old, Japanese)

15. Japanese, Turkish, and English: discovery of loss of frog-sadness-inception of search
Trabasso and Rodkin (1994) find that 80% of the adult English-speaking narrators indicate the sadness of the boy upon discovering that the frog has disappeared
out of 15 adult Turkish narrators, only 4 included an emotional reaction for the same scene
3 sadness, 1 surprise
and only 4 out of 16 Japanese adult narrators
2 surprise, 1 sadness, 1 worry
for younger children, not more than one participant for each group in Japanese and Turkish
much higher ratios for American children

16. Cultural explanations
cultural differences in shared knowledge and what needs to be explicitly stated
expect the listener to fill in the information about mental states
Minami and McCabe (1995): Japanese adults believe that preschool children should be able to read the mind of others (i.e., have empathy) and count on others’ filling out parts of stories that can be easily inferred

17. Page 1: A happy (?) family of Boy, Dog, and Frog

18. Page 2: Boy & Dog Sleep, Frog Escapes

19. Page 3: Boy & Dog wake up, realize the frog is gone. Are they upset/sad?

20. Page 4: Boy & Dog start the search

21. Implications
Turkish and Japanese narrators do not feel as compelled as American narrators to talk about an intermediary emotional event that links the boy’s noticing of the loss of the frog and the inception of the search
It might be possible to explain this difference in terms of cultural differences in shared knowledge and what needs to be explicitly stated

22. Conceptual deficit explanations
there is no reason to suspect that Turkish and Japanese narrators lack the basic cognitive capacity of inferring psychological states from certain situations, but this understanding does not seem to be as robustly expressed as part of their explicit interpretive stance as in the 9-year-old and adult American narratives that Bamberg and Damrad-Frye (1991) studied
For Japanese and Turkish narrators, causal explanations regarding mental states do not seem to be among the dominant forms of narrative evaluative devices, at least as far as the frog-story task is concerned
not likely

23. Developmental trends
3-yr-old
5-yr-old