| How children tell their own personal narratives reflects both their age and their culture. This dissertation looks at how language shapes and is shaped by culture-specific experiences through analysis of: (1) how young Japanese children develop narrative structure, and (2) how Japanese parents guide their children in the acquisition of culture-specific styles of narrative.; The first question deals with the existence of culture-specific narrative style. Personal narratives of 20 middle-class Japanese preschool children, half of them four years old and half five; their mothers' narratives were also analyzed. The results indicate that with age, children change and develop in their capacity to provide nonsequential information, in order to produce full-fledged, rhetorically well-formed narratives, as most adult narrators do. Also, preschool children seem to have understood what the canonical narrative form is like, and they gradually come to tell narratives in culture-specific ways.; While the first question addresses young children's personal narratives, the second looks at their narratives in the context of mother-child interactions. The results demonstrate that from early childhood on, Japanese children learn the narrative style valued by their mothers. The link between maternal narrative elicitation strategies and children's developing narrative skill is also demonstrated, that is, Japanese mothers, scaffolding children's narratives, support their children's progressive contributions to the narrative task.; To complement this work and to support generalizations about the culture-specific nature of caregivers' practices, this dissertation study further compares mother-child narrative discourse in Japan and North America. The study illustrates that North American mothers allow their young children to take long monologic turns, ask their children many questions about the content of the monologue, and offer positive evaluation of the narrative. Japanese mothers, on the other hand, paying close attention to their children's narratives, facilitate frequent turn exchanges and offer few evaluative comments. Thus, while both Japanese and North American mothers support their children's talk about the past, they ensure that it begins to take the shape of narration valued by their culture. Overall, therefore, this dissertation study illuminates the degree to which sociocultural specificity and relativism influence narrative discourse practice. |
