رشد پیوستگی علّی در گفتمان روایتی کودکان تک‌زبانۀ فارسی‌زبان

تواناییِ تولیدِ گفتمانی که پیوستگی دارد، یکی از مولفه‌های ضروریِ دانشِ رشدی کودک، در هنگامِ فراگیری زبان، است. این توانایی، بخش مهمی از دانش زبانی به شمار می آید که کودکان نیازمندِ فراگیریِ آن هستند. هدف از انجامِ پژوهشِ حاضر، بررسی توانایی کودکان تک‌زبانۀ فارسی‌زبان در حفظ پیوستگی داستان بوده است. همچنین این مقاله در پی مقایسۀ یافته‌های خود با پژوهش‌های دیگری است تا یافته‌های پیشین با استفاده از تحلیل شبکۀ علّی تایید شود. به این منظور، سی کودک 5-6 ساله (با میانگین سنی 5 سال و 6 ماه)  و سی کودک 9-10 ساله (با میانگین سنی 9 سال و 6 ماه) به عنوان آزمودنی‌های پژوهش مورد بررسی قرارگرفتند. در هر گروه سنی، 30 کودک پسر شرکت کردند. سی بزرگسال مرد تک‌زبانۀ فارسی‌زبان 20-25 ساله (با میانگین سنی 23 سال و 8 ماه)  نیز به عنوان گروه کنترل مورد بررسی قرار گرفتند. این سه گروه با استفاده از دو داستان مصور «قورباغه تو کجائی» و «قورباغه» ترغیب به روایت داستان شدند. داستان‌های روایت‌شده براساس شبکۀ علّی مورد بررسی قرار گرفتند. بر پایه یافته‌های پژوهش رشد کودکان در دست یابی به پیوستگی داستان، با استفاده از برقراری روابط علّی میانِ رویدادهای داستان محقق شد. به طور کلی، نتایج پژوهش نشان داد که شبکۀ علّی در مقایسه با پیوندهای علّی، ابزاری حساس‌تری است که می تواند برای نمایاندن رشد کودکان در حفظ پیوستگی داستان به کار رود.

Development of causal coherence in the narrative discourse of monolingual Persianspeaking children

A narrative discourse is a discourse that is an account of events, usually in the past, that employs verbs of speech, motion, and action to describe a series of events that are contingent one on another, and that typically focuses on one or more performers of actions. Narrative discourse has been of intense interest to researchers. The ability to produce coherent discourse as an important component of child developmental knowledge during language acquisition is an essential part of language knowledge which child should acquire. The aims of the present research are to investigate the ability of monolingual Persianspeaking children in maintaining narrative coherence and also to compare the findings with other studies in order to acknowledge previous findings based on analysis of causal network. To this aim, thirty 5 to 6yearold children (mean age= 5 years and 6 months), thirty 9 to10yearold children (mean age= 9 years and 6 months) were selected among 100 children. Thirty 2025 male adults (mean age=23 years and 8 months) participated in the study. All participants were typically developing children and had no learning disabilities or speech or hearing problems and were of the same socioeconomic status and verbal intelligence. Moreover, children were also controlled for their productive and receptive language abilities and only those children with the same language abilities were selected. These groups were encouraged to narrate two picture story books namely “Frog, Where are you?” and “Frog”.  The first one is about a boy who loses his rabbit and is engaged in an adventure to find it. This story is a reliable tool to investigate narrative abilities of children. The second one (i.e. “Frog”) was used to control the content of the story. This story consisted of a series of complex events which enables the narrator to produce various connections between those events. Therefore, it is suitable for investigating how different events are connected to each other. The interviews were carried out individually with each participant and consisted of an initial warmup conversation. The interviews were audiotaped and subsequently transcribed. Their stories were analyzed based on their length, the causal network which measured overtly and nonovertly marked causal statements, causal chain events and causal connections. The findings of the study showed a developmental progress in producing longer stories and achieving narrative coherence by means of establishing causal relations between narrative events. The findings of the study showed that adults were significantly more likely to use overtly marked causal statements than children did; however, the difference between nineyearolds and fiveyearolds was not significant. These findings also showed that adults were significantly more likely to use nonovert statements than children and nineyearolds outperformed fiveyearolds in this regard. With regard to discourse tendency, within each group, the participants used significantly more nonovertly marked causal statements than the overtly marked statements. With regard to the encoding of causalchain events, the findings showed that both nineyearolds and fiveyearolds outperformed adults by having larger density in this regard and despite that, the agerelated difference between the two groups of children was not significant. The findings also showed that adults and nineyearolds were significantly more likely to encode causal connections than were fiveyearolds. With regard to the pattern of causal connectedness, the findings revealed agerelated differences for each type. For C0, fiveyearolds were significantly more likely to employ them than nineyearolds and adults. A reverse pattern was shown for C3+ events, which were encoded more by both adults and nineyearolds than by the younger children. While C1 events were the dominant type used by fiveyearolds, C2 events were preferred by nineyearolds. Therefore, nineyearolds and adults tended to encode events with higher causal connectedness. The results of the study indicated that compared with causal connectives, the causal network appears to be a more sensitive tool to reveal children’s development in maintaining coherence. The results also showed that the system of causal network provides an alternative to quantitatively assess narrative coherence by covering all possible causal relations, which encompass overtly and nonovertly marked causal connectivity between adjacent and nonadjacent propositions. Since the narrative intelligence of participants was not controlled, it is suggested to control this variable in future research to obtain more accurate results. Researchers have pointed to the narrative intelligence as one of the cognitive determinants of narrative ability. They believe that factors related to intelligence play an important role in the development of the structure of narrative. Therefore, it is suggested to match participants in terms of narrative intelligence in order to obtain more reliable results.