An Empirical Study On Language Production And Working Memory In Personal Experience Narratives

The study of personal experience narratives has received much attention in recent years, and has become part of the work together with language production. Labov (1972) has studied the functional categories of narratives and concludes that every narrative should be composed of six categories, that is, abstract, orientation, complicating action, result, evaluation and coda. Shiro (2003) also analyzed the production of narratives from the aspect of the evaluative language, thus realized the association between language production and narratives. With the development of working memory, many scholars are studying language production together with working memory, and have received remarkable achievements (Baddeley,1986; 2000; 2001; 2003; Baddeley & Hitch,1974). However, the associative studies are rare at present. We propose that narratives and language production are closely related, and so are narratives and working memory; thus, it is necessary to contrast produced narratives with memorized narratives. In order to acquire a deep comprehension of narrative characters in the two experiments, we contrastively analyzed narrative structures and evaluative language in oral and written narratives as well as in memorized oral and written narratives.This thesis focuses on the most unforgettable experience made by Chinese college students, and extremely on the features of narrative production and working memory. Sixty students altogether from different universities and different majors participated in the study. This research adopted Labov's (1972) six functional categories of narratives and Shiro's (2003) evaluative language to analyze these produced narratives made by Chinese college students. Finally, SPSS 17.0 was used to descriptively analyze these experimental numbers.These studies have revealed that the personal experience narratives of Chinese college students exhibit all of the six categories presented by Labov. That is to say, Labovian categories seem to exist in a non-western language like Chinese irrespective of the oral and written versions or memorized oral and written versions used in the narrative. The only inconsistency with respect to the Labovian model was in the use of "abstract" and "coda" categories in written and oral versions and memorized written and oral versions. The frequency of these categories was significantly higher in the written narratives and memorized narratives. Moreover, the use of "abstract" and "coda" categories seemed optional among Chinese college students, whereas the other four categories were used obligatorily. These findings are in line with the findings of other studies which suggest that not all stories have abstracts and codas (Johnstone,2001). The use of evaluative language was also analyzed in terms of the categories presented by Shiro. The two experiments found that the use of evaluative sentences is significantly higher in the written version and the memorized written version. However, the order of occurrence of the evaluative categories was found to be the same in both narrative modes and both memorized narrative modes. Thus, the "emotion" category was most frequent in both versions in two experiments. However, when the frequency of these categories is compared in terms of oral and written versions and memorized oral and written versions, the use of the "emotion" category is significantly higher in the oral and memorized oral narratives. This indicates the high emotional state of the oral and memorized unforgettable narratives.