Early talk about the past
The origins of conversational stories of personal experience
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20366254 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peggy J Miller (0009-0001-2353-9848, University of Chicago, corresponding author), Linda L Sperry (University of Chicago) |
| Year | 1988 |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 293-315 |
| Publication date | 1988-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Child Language (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0305-0009 • E-ISSN: 1469-7602 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0305000900012381 |
| PMID | 3209645 |
| OpenAlex | W2143807847 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 93 |
| References cited | 16 |
This paper explores children's early talk about specific distant past events and its development into conversational stories of personal experience, with special focus on its evaluative function. The data consist of longitudinal home observations of five working-class children and their mothers from ages 2; 0 to 2; 6. Results indicate that during this period the children talked primarily about negative past events, especially events of physical harm; the rate of talk about specific past events doubled; temporally-ordered sequences increased dramatically; and the children became better able to accomplish such talk independently. In addition, one of the most striking findings is the extent to which these 2–year-olds were able to communicate their attitude toward the past event, with speech about the past containing five times more evaluative devices than other speech. These results suggest that (1) by age 2; 6 stories of personal experience emerged in incipient form, and (2) the roots of this genre lie not only in cognitive skills and social interactional support but in the emotional significance of the depicted event
Cognition · Developmental psychology · Harm · Child and Animal Learning Development · Language Development and Disorders · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Psychology · Social Psychology
Parenting evaluations for the court
Clinical Issues
An exploratory study of mother-child storytelling in East India and Northeast United States
Modalités Du Non-Dévoilement Dans Les Récits d'Enfants Victimes d'Agression Sexuelle
Genre and evaluation in narrative development
Encouraging narratives in preschoolers
The Irony of Self-Expression
Qué, dónde, cómo, cuándo, por qué? La construcción de la coherencia causal en relatos infantiles de experiencia personal / What, Where, How, When, Why? The Construction of Causal Coherence in Children’s Narratives of Personal Experience
Comparing bilinguals' quoted performances of self and others in tellings of the same experience in two languages
Storytelling as a Bridge to Literacy
Working-Class Children’s Experience through the Prism of Personal Storytelling
Emergence of Autobiographical Memory at Age 4
Enacting Stories, Seeing Worlds
Adding Culture to Studies of Development
Effects of participation on children's reports
Personal narrative as a “breeding ground” for higher-order thinking talk in early parent–child interactions
Narrative processing in typically developing children and children with early unilateral brain injury
Parental styles of talking about the past
Language Development
New Directions in Analyses of Parenting Contributions to Children's Acquisition of Values
Three‐month‐olds show a negativity bias in their social evaluations
Functions of parent-child reminiscing about emotionally negative events
The Emergence of Autobiographical Memory
Personal Storytelling as a Medium of Socialization in Chinese and American Families
Young children's presentations of self in conversational narration
Self in relation to other
Narrative Making and Remaking in the Early Years
Cultural practices
The cultural context of talk about the past
In nomine Diaboli
Preliminary effects of a pilot listening comprehension intervention on the narrative abilities of children with ASD
Toddlers as active, competent story weavers
Collaborative Storytelling With Spanish Primary School Students
But what about the beginning ?”
Omnia Vincit Amor
Pro Domo Sua
Children's Self‐esteem and Moral Self
Constructing Emotional and Relational Understanding
Narratives of transformation
Family Narrative as Political Activity
In the light of interbeing
You know what?” Conversational narratives of preschool children
Mothers, Fathers, Daughters, Sons
Co-constructed storytelling as a site for socialization in parent–child interaction
Gender differences in parent-child conversations about past emotions
Discourse cohesion in sign and speech
Explaining Events in Narratives
The who, when and where of early narratives
How children learn to produce appropriate referring expressions in narratives
Children's use of evaluative devices in spoken and written narratives
Functional changes in early child language
A longitudinal analysis of young children's cohesion and noun specification in narratives
Displacement and informativeness in child-directed talk
Oral Discourse in the Preschool Years and Later Literacy Skills
Talking to the beat
Young preschoolers' ability to reference story characters
Creating an environmental resiliency framework
Beyond Labov and Waletzky
The Life Story and the Study of Resilience and Response to Adversity
Conversational Analysis in L2 Acquisition and Teaching
Theoretical Underpinnings of Reducing the Media’s Negative Effect on Children
Theoretical advances in understanding children’s memory for distressing events
Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan
Children’s Online Collaborative Storytelling during 2020 Covid-19 Home Confinement
Théories de l’esprit et acquisition du langage chez le jeune enfant
Developing expressive language skills of deaf students through specialized writing instruction
Writing outcomes and expressive language use of deaf high school students
Reminiscing With Mothers and Others
Teaching Storytelling
Beyond Labov and Waletzky
Narrative Theory and Narrative Development
Collaborators and Critics
Learning to Reminisce
Emotion and Narrative Structure in Young Children's Personal Accounts
Comparing Narrative and Expository Text Construction Across Adolescence
Comparing Narrative and Expository Text Construction Across Adolescence
Storytelling as a theory‐building activity
Content and consistency in young children's autobiographical recall
Cultural Variations in the Construction of Personal Narratives
Referential strategies in the narratives of Japanese children
Differences in early parent-child conversations about negative versus positive emotions
Narratives beget narratives
Narrative Conjunctions of Caregiver and Child
Narrative practices and the social construction of self in childhood
The construction of the child and the self in time and place
When Your Powers Combine, I am Captain Planet
Episodic Boundaries in Conversational Narratives
(Re)Modeling Culture in Kwara'ae
Getting a life
An analysis of speaker role inhabitance in narratives of personal experience
The audience shaping of text-strategies in spoken discourse
Everyday updates
Self-Construction through Narrative Practices
Three Processes in the Child's Acquisition of Syntax
Pretend Play in Childhood
Imitation in language development
Narrative, literacy and face in interethnic communication
Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts
Ways with Words
From discourse to semantics
Preschool children's intraconversational narratives
The role of social context in memory development
The generalities and specifics of long-term memory in infants and young children
The role of adult-child play in language development
Children's use of scripts in story recall
New Directions in Discourse Processing
Linguistic and social constraints on storytelling
| Unique citing works | 93 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2,45 |
| Citation span | 1988 - 2025 (38) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 75 |