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?
What does narrative contribute to
developmental psycholinguistics that is
not available through experimentation?
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
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
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.
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.
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).
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”?
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.
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.
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