A CARTOON OR A SERIES OF PICTURES? THE PROBLEM OF CHOOSING AN EXPERIMENTAL TECHNIQUE

Abstract

Various experimental techniques are used in child language studies to research the development of coherent and cohesive narrative. The most common of them are the elicitation narrative tasks based on a series of pictures or on a video, for example, a cartoon. However, the comparison of the studies carried out using different methods shows the results that can both coincide and significantly diverge. Among the factors that influence the basic narrative characteristics of elicited child stories are age, the type of visual stimulus, its length, and the way the narrative is produced (online vs. subsequent mode). The following basic characteristics are considered to study the structure of narratives: opening and closing markers, details and separateness of the narration, the variety of characters and the presence (absence) of evaluation. The question whether the type of visual stimulus has a significant effect on the basic characteristics of children’s narratives and whether it is possible to construct a general description of the development of narrative skills regardless of the experimental task chosen by the researchers is discussed with a comparative analysis of oral narratives collected within two series of experiments with Russian native monolingual children of the senior preschool and primary school age. The analysis showed that although it is possible to reveal some tendencies inherent in the narratives collected with different experimental methods, the type of visual stimulus does not have any statistically significant effect on the basic characteristics of the narratives of primary schoolchildren. Only the differences in evaluation and closing markers in the narratives of older preschoolers, elicited either simultaneously with watching the cartoon or during its subsequent retelling, are statistically significant. Refs 37.