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Psychology of Language: Narrative Research

Psychology of Language: Narrative Research. Dr. Kathleen Peets Postdoctoral Research Fellow York University kpeets@yorku.ca Thursday, April 3rd, 2008. Overview. My background Discourse as a unit of language Narrative as a type of discourse What can narrative tell us about the mind?

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Psychology of Language: Narrative Research

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  1. Psychology of Language: Narrative Research Dr. Kathleen Peets Postdoctoral Research Fellow York University kpeets@yorku.ca Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

  2. Overview • My background • Discourse as a unit of language • Narrative as a type of discourse • What can narrative tell us about the mind? • What does narrative contribute to developmental psycholinguistics that is not available through experimentation?

  3. My Background • Linguistics + Psychology = Psycholinguistics? • From theory to empiricism • From York to Cambridge and back to York (why did I ever leave???) • From ideal to messy – the language of children

  4. Discourse: Unit of Language • Smallest unit of language is a…phoneme • Smallest meaningful unit of language is a…morpheme • Unit of analysis that formalists prefer to study is…the sentence (syntax) • What results if you put several sentences together? • Discourse

  5. What is discourse? The train left the station. How are you? Why did the boy do that? She was in school at that time. Yes, it’s true, I do like him. They will not come. It won’t blow away. You do, too.

  6. Is this discourse? York University is comprised of many colleges. One of these is Glendon College, which is located at Lawrence and Bayview. This is a bilingual college with many students from around the world. They can study in English or in French, but each must study to a certain degree in their non-native language.

  7. Discourse Type: Narrative • Around the age of 4, children start to put sentences together to relate experiences from their lives through narrative: – the use of connected sentences to form a cohesive and coherent account of an experience, either personal or fictional • Narrative is one of the most widely studied discourse forms in child language research, but it is not the only one (explanations, negotiations, descriptions, conversation, and others).

  8. Narrative and the Mind • So we have a nice story – how is this related to the mind? • Linguistic: performance as evidence of competence • Macro structure • Linguistic errors • Online speech processing phenomena • Psychological: thinking as seen in language use • Does the child use mental state words? • Can the child understand the perspectives of others? • Do speech processing patterns suggest “effortful processing”?

  9. Narrative 1: Frog, where are you? Child: Once upon a time there was a boy and a dog looking in a jar with a frog in it. Child: When the boy and the dog were sleeping the frog jumped out of the jar. Child: When the boy and the dog woke up in the morning they saw the jar empty. Child: the boy looked in his boots. Child: and the dog looked in the jar.

  10. Narrative 2: Frog, where are you? Child: The…the boy and the dog… first saw… the… the… the… Child: boy and the dog caught a frog. Child: so they found a jar. Child: and put it… in there. Child: they took it home. Child: they decided to have a nap.

  11. Beyond Experimentation: What Narrative Contributes • Experimentation: • Controlled environment, isolation of variables • Address highly specific research questions • Infer causation • Narrative: • Ecological validity, contextualized variables • Rich data source • Can be used in combination with experimental methods

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