Adolescent narrative structure: Social class and age differences across audience

This thesis examines age and social class differences in the structural elements of adolescents' narratives and how use of narrative elements may vary across audience. Sixty-seven ninth and twelfth grade girls were compared on narrative and evaluative elements in personal experience narratives told to a peer of similar age and social class background and to an adult middle-class experimenter.;There were significant main effects of audience on narrative length and frequency of narrative structure and evaluative elements. There were also significant main effects of age on narrative length and frequency of narrative structure and evaluative elements. However, there were very few effects of audience and grade on the rates per clause of these elements. There were no main effects of social class on length or on any of the narrative elements. There was however, an interaction between audience and social class, indicating that working class participants had significantly higher words per clause in their experimenter narratives than in their peer narratives, while the opposite was true for middle class participants; middle class narrators produced significantly fewer words per clause in their experimenter narratives than in their peer narratives. Additionally, there was a significant effect of social class on the use of two types of evaluation, performed language (e.g., emphasis, sound effects) and hypotheticals (e.g., "If I could have asked for help"). Working-class subjects produced a greater frequency and rate per clause of stylized language and a greater frequency of hypotheticals than did the middle-class subjects.;These results suggest that narrative performances include more elaborate details of events and their significance to the story characters when told by a twelfth grader rather than a ninth grader and when told to an unfamiliar adult than to a peer. Additionally, in contrast to other research that has found consistent differences found between working class and middle class speakers at the lexical or syntactic level, narrators from these two social groups did not differ significantly from one another in the ways in which they used narrative elements or most types of evaluative elements.