EMOTION EXPRESSIONS AND KNOWLEDGE OF STORY STRUCTURE: A STUDY OF MANDARIN-SPEAKING CHILDREN’S NARRATIVE DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

The present study investigates developmental differences in Mandarin-speaking children’s use of emotion expressions in narratives and their relatedness to the narrators’ knowledge of story structure. Our data yield age-related differences in the use of emotion expressions. More importantly, the narrators’ emotion expressions seem to respond to different hierarchical levels in the story structure. In particular, the five-year-olds’ emotion expressions were mostly triggered by local, immediate situations. Most nine-year-olds’ emotion expressions were motivated by local situations, while few of them considered both local and global story structure. The adults’ attribution of emotion, however, was triggered by both local situations and the global story plotline, which served to enhance narrative coherence. In addition, the five-year-olds’ attribution of emotion mostly focused on one character in the story, while the adults’ attribution involved several characters, which suggests that the adults possess better ability in perspective-taking. Our data suggest that the use of emotion expressions may disclose narrators’ knowledge of story structure and reflect their ability in maintaining narrative coherence. Findings are discussed in relation to the development of event schema, theory of mind and the Three-Phase Model for problem-solving.

本研究探討敘事者對故事結構的掌握及其對故事人物情緒感受的描述間之關係。研究結果顯示：年齡較小的兒童傾向以故事人物面部表情或局部考量為情感指涉的依據；隨年齡漸長，兒童對局部情節的依賴遞減，故事整體架構遂成為其情感描述的參考；而成人敘事者能適當整合故事局部情節與整體架構，應運而生的情感描述語詞則有助於敘事連貫。此外，年齡較小的兒童往往僅針對一個固定角色描述其內心情感；成人敘事者則能遊走穿梭於不同人物角色的內心世界。