Young children's presentations of self in conversational narration

Conversational narration ofers an opportunity for young children to dispfay both static and dynamic concepts of self.

Young Children’s Presentations of Self in Conversational Narration Linda L. Sperry, Douglas E. Sperry

In the following excerpt, Hortense, an African-American grandmother in her sixties and living in the rural South, is interviewed by Linda, a European- American mother in her thirties. At the time, both women had been acquainted for over three years.

LINDA: What do men talk about when they, when they stand around talkin’? HORTENSE: When they’re talkin’ about, um, they usually talk about ‘Back then

when I ., . .’ They would talk about their family and, uh, their farm. And they’d brag about their horses. And they cows, chickens, or whatever [laughs].

LINDA: Uh huh, [laughs] whatever they’re raising, right [laughs]. HORTENSE: [laughs] And so, so the little boys learn from them, you know, to

LINDA: Huh. HORTENSE: Whereas, the ladies, they just talk casual, like, housekeeping and

LINDA: Uh huh. HORTENSE: They really brag. You hardly ever catch a, a lady you know, just get-

ting out doin’ what they call ‘tall-bragging.’ They but men will do it. . . . The men in the family will take up more time with the boys than they will with

be outspoken.

. . . sewing. Things like that. But men really, they-they-they brag.

Portions of the research reported here were supported by fellowships and grants to Linda Speny from the Irving Harris Center for Developmental Studies and the Spencer Foun- dation.

NEW DiitEmoNs FOR CHILD D ~ l a a p ~ n u r , no. 69. Fall 1995 0 Joaey-&W Publlchcrs 47

48 YOUNG CHILDREN’S CONCEPTS OF SELF AND OTHER

the girls. Because me and my husband separated and [my son] Boyds uncle, his first cousin, and other relatives, they just kept him around them all the time. And carried him places. And when Boyd got five or six years old he had been to Chicago, Detroit, and California.

LINDA: Um hm. HORTENSE: But [my daughter] Rayleen had never been there [laughs]. She went

to Chicago after she got grown. But Boyd had been, like I say, he had been, you know, several, places far north. And so those men, when they would come home on their vacation, they would get him and they would keep him from the time they get here until they leave. And they would stand around and talk and make him talk. And I would tell ‘em, I’d say Y’all just gonna make my baby be a big ol’ storyteller.’

What acts of human experience help to define an individual’s identity? By this grandmother’s account, young boys and girls may encounter dramatically different socialization experiences. Hortense suggests that these different experiences may culminate in two distinct, cultural models of self: a reality-based, quotidian, female self; and a vision-driven, above-the-fray, male self. Hortense seems to echo the philosophy of Mead (1934) by implying that children acquire an understanding of the self through their experience with important others. Meads model suggests that important others impart their own concept of the child’s self to the child through both their direct attributions (reflecting what the child’s self should be) and their responses to the childs behaviors (reflecting what the child’s self may already be). Furthermore, Mead argues that the medium through which much of this everyday interpretation occurs is conversation-with children, about children, and around children (Miller and Moore, 1989).

Mead incorporated into his theory of self James’s distinction ([ 18901 1983) between the objective ‘tme” and the subjective “I.” Damon and Hart (1988), building on James’s description, articulated physical, active, social, and psychological components of the objective “me.” Based on the results of a clin- ical interview study Damon and Hart (1988) reported that all four components are present in immature form by the time a child is five to six years old. Evi- dence from other research laboratories lends support to claims that aspects of the objective self may develop during early childhood and even infancy (Kagan, 1989; Lewis and Brooks-Gunn, 1979; Miller and others, 1992; Smi- ley and Greene, this volume). However, the amount and the range of understanding of the self that is possessed by toddlers (and particularly by toddlers from diverse cultural backgrounds) remains unclear. One purpose of this study is to examine the relationships among the components of the “me” as they emerge.

In James’s philosophy, the objective self is completely knowable to the individual, while the subjective self remains intangble. However, Mead (1934) contended. that we can glimpse effects of the subjective self in certain experi-

CHILDREN’S PRESENTATIONS OF SELF IN CONVERSATIONAL NARRATION 49

ential contexts, such as in the pursuit of remembered actions of the self or in the self‘s contradictions of previously organized attitudes. In Meads theory, these organized attitudes of others constitute the “me” to which the “I” responds in mature self-reflection.

Mead specified three developmental phases along the pathway to the mature, reflective self, each phase building upon and encompassing the last. Each person is, from the beginning of life, a “biologic” individual who responds to stimulation, adjusting to it “in an immediate fashion,” without conscious reasoning (Mead, 1934, p. 195). Gradually the child begins to select attitudes of individuals who surround the child, “not by direct imitation, but through his tending to call out in himself in any situation the same reaction which he calls out in others“ (p. 369). Society, at this developmental point, provides not only the questions, but also the answers concerning the child’s knowledge of the self. The child internalizes both the questions and the answers as a set of attitudes that will provide stimulus and response for role playing.

In the next phase, the child imitates roles organized by society and learned through language. This role play doe2 not yet involve self-reflection, since the child only assumes the role without understanding his relationship to it, becoming ua composite of all the individuals he addresses” (Mead, 1934, pp. 369-370). Role playing for Mead entails the entire body of socially constructed meaning for the child (including rule structures, for example), since through role playing the child may explore her own “parental impulse.” Finally, the genesis of self-reflection occurs when, during this role playing, the child first begins to object to a gwen role and begins the role play anew, this time communicating with the self as another social being (Mead, 1934, p. 372).

Mead proposed that communication was the mechanism that motivates the development of self, since the self may view itself as an object in the reflec- tions others have of it. Communication is culturally constituted, however. A s a result, the functions that drive this mechanism may vary across communicative contexts and cultural practices.

Affirming Mead’s concept of the self as inherently relational, Miller and her colleagues (1992) argued that one communicative context through which researchers might approach children’s development of an understanding of the self is conversational narratives of personal experience. First, such narratives provide the child with social information about the self that is mediated through language. Second, the act of telling such stories, because their topic is the self‘s actions at an earlier point in time, allows us privileged access to the organized set of attitudes of others about self (the “me”) possessed by the child at the time of narration. Finally, the use of language to talk about self, by its very nature, enables self-reflection. Therefore, if Mead is correct and the sense of self consists of the self‘s perceptions of what others think about the self, conversational narrative provides a tool for accessing both self-understanding, or the static content of the self concept, and the dynamic process through which children perceive what others think about them.


Analyzing the Child’s Understanding of “I” and “Me” in Narratives Descriptions of early childhood narratives have emphasized their co- constructed nature (Fivush, 1991; Hudson, 1991; Miller and Sperry, 1988). In fact, evidence suggests that toddlers often cannot tell narratives without the assistance of others (Botvin and Sutton-Smith, 1977; Pitcher and Prelinger, 1963). This observation is consonant with Vygotsky’s (1978) notion of the zone of proximal development. Inasmuch as conversational narrative is co- constructed, it records not only the child’s own understanding of the self at the moment of narration, but also the understanding of the childS self that is possessed by another person. AnaJysis of conversational narrative allows discrim- ination of these separate conceptualizations, because the provenance of linguistic references within an episode can be traced. Through this tracing, we can assess whether the self-reference originates with the child, and is therefore evidence of the child‘s static understanding of the self, or whether it originates with the interlocutor, and is therefore evidence of the subjective process by which the child perceives another’s view of self.

In the following example of a conversational narrative, constructed jointly by thirty-two-month-old Lamont, his mother, and his sister, the provenance of the child’s references to self is illustrated:

LAMONT: ‘Old lady witch fell in a ditch.’ [staring out at yard] MOTHER: ‘Old lady witch fell in a ditch? [adjusting Lamont’s clothes] IAMONT: Yeah. [turns head back toward mother without facing her] SISTER: Yeah. MOTHER: How y’all know? Yall seen her? SISTER: Yeah. MOTHER: Uh uh. [contradicting Lamont’s sister] IAMONT: Uh huh. [contradicting his mother] MOTHER: Yall didn’t see her. LAMONT: I saw her to the store. I saw her to the store. MOTHER: Yall seen her to the store? How, how she look? LAMONT: Ugly [looking up] MOTHER: [laughs]

In this excerpt, Lamont’s mother initially provided the information (“Yall seen her?”) that Lamont later included in h e statement, “I saw her to the store.” By contrast, Lamont himself provided the information about the location of the alleged incident (“to the store”).

There are at least two forms that interlocutor support may take. First, the interlocutor may provide minimal discourse-level support, asking the child to confirm previously stated information (“Uh huh; “Really?”) or answer open- ended questions (“What happened?”; “What did you do?”). These speech acts provide minimal information with which the child might reconceptualize the objective self.

CHILDREN'S PRESENTATIONS OF SELF IN CONVERSATIONAL NARRATION 5 1

Second, the interlocutor may provide detailed content-level support through contributions of specific facts (Tall didn't see her") or specific questions ("How you feel?"; "What did you buy today?"; "Did you go to Granny's?"). These interlocutor contributions provide children with an ongoing series of self- descriptions from which they may or may not draw new concepts of self. The degree to which the child incorporates these interlocutor contributions may provide a measure of the dynamic, socialized process of formation of the self.

It is our contention that the manner in which the child employs interlocutor-provided references to the self provides a starting point for analyzing how the self develops from a role-playing to a reflective function. When the child portrays self with minimal assistance from an interlocutor, or when such assistance is ignored, we have little or no basis for suggesting that the child's co-narrations reflect ongoing dynamic change in self-understanding. Rather, they give us a mirror of the child's static knowledge of the objective "me." However, when children use interlocutor support to modify or add to the semantic content of their narrative presentations, we can infer that these efforts may reflect their thoughts about the perspective of others. In that way, deter- mining the provenance of references to self is useful for observing the extent to which the child commences, through language, to become an object to himself or herself.

Study In this chapter we investigate young children's stories. Two research questions framed our investigation: How do two- to three-and-a-half-year-old children portray themselves? What social processes accompany these narrative por- trayals of self? A primary assumption of this work is that speakers direct conversational topics along pathways of their own choosing, and that topics therefore reflect intentional expressions of belief that are possibly conscious of self, but not necessarily Through content analysis of the child's references to self and through analysis of the provenance of the childs references to self within these conversational narratives, we seek insight not only into the child's conception of self at various developmental times, but also into the social process by which this conception of self may be created, nurtured, encouraged, or allowed to take shape.

Conversational narratives, such as the story Hortense told about her son, Boyd, or the fantasy narrative constructed by Lamont and his family are a com- mon form of talk in the African-American community under study. Not only do adults tell stories for information and for entertainment, they also help young children tell stories (Sperry and Sperq 1991). Children as young as two years old produce narrativelike displaced-event talk that is distinguishable from their conversation about current events along dimensions of explicitness of reference to agents, times, and locations (Speny and Sperq 1993).

Past Versus Fantasy. We examine two narrative contexts in this study: conversation about past events and conversation about fantasy events. Fantasy


is distinguished from pretend play in that fantasy narratives concern events that could not or would not really happen and are told without benefit of props.

These two contexts were selected for two reasons, based on previous research (Sperry, 1991). First, past and fantasy were the two most frequent types of events that occurred in the narrativelike displaced-event speech of these two- and three-year-old subjects. Second, past and fantasy events are interesting in that they signal different participant structures and different norms of relevance to the families of these children. As indicated by mothers and grandmothers in lengthy poststudy interviews, past events are important to the world of women, since personal relationships depend an the accurate sharing of news about mutual acquaintances. By contrast, fantasy events are believed to belong to the world of men, and they are correspondingly deemed inappropriate for mother-child conversation. Further, young children tend to receive different feedback from their female caregivers when telling about past ,versus fantasy events. This difference in typical participant structures provides an opportunity to consider how children conceptualize self on their own (in fantasy) and with information and feedback from family members (in past).

Data. Data were collected as part of a larger naturalistic, longitudinal study of fourteen African-American two-year-olds (seven boys and seven girls) and their families in the rural Black Belt of the southern United States (Speq, 1991). The Black Belt region is a crescent-shaped swath of once rich, fertile black earth reaching from the Mississippi delta into Georgia. Historically, this area supported large numbers of cotton plantations (Hackney, 1969). The subjects were videotaped at home as they interacted naturally with their families. Two-hour videotaped observations were collected once every two months. From verbatim transcripts of the second half hour of sixty-two samples including six girls and six boys aged two years to three years, six months, eighty-nine past and eighty-six fantasy narrativelike displaced-event episodes were identi- fied. An episode is defined as a topic-oriented piece of discourse in which the child asserts at least one displaced event and one other related utterance. All narratives were interactive between the child subject and one or more interlocutors.

Coding Procedures. Each verbalized reference to self by a child was coded with regard to the four components of self-as-object knowledge: physical, active, social, or psychological. Within each of these components, between five and six different themes emerged through description of the data. Exam- ples of each theme are presented in Table 4.1. The coding scheme permitted the analysis of multiple references to self per utterance, since each reference was conceptualized from the perspective of case grammar relationships (Fill- more, 1968; compare Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood, 1975). Therefore, Kendrick‘s utterance at thirty-two months, ‘‘I gonna squeeze that monster,” contains two references to self, one of active aggression (I gonna hurt by squeezing) and one of social relation (I have a relationship with a monster). We acknowledge that this method of coding is not the most conservative, since

CHILDREN'S PRESENTATIONS OF SELF IN CONVERSATIONAL N A W T I O N 53

Table 4.1 Presentations of Self in Narration: Coding Scheme

Dimension Theme Example Physical

Possession "that's my bicycle" Harm to self "he (the dog) gonna bite me" Body feature "I have a stomach" Name "my name Doe" Ability -my Leg hurt, I can't walk"

Everyday activity "I see a tree outdoor" Special activity "I graduate out the day-care center" Organizer "I wouldn't do that (hand out pieces of gum at the party)'' Child prohibits "him (the monster) not gonna hurt me, I gonna hug him" Child aggresses "I gonna bite you"

Child prohibited "nobody let me (play outside today)" Benefit Share Possession "I bite my granny" Relation "eh, and us" Rule

Desire Emotion "I'm not cryin' Need Cognition LikeDislike

Active

Social

"he (Santa) throwed candy to me" "I gonna read it (book) to that, that monster"

"I 'on can't (push babies on the swings)"

"I want some money outta that dog (bank)

"I don't need any rabbit)" "me think they gonna call Janna now" "my frog come here, cause I like him"

Psychological

to a certain extent it reflects the subject-verb-object (SVO) patterns of English and may be sensitive to differences in ability across children learning language. However, our data contain numerous instances where obligatory SVO relationships were not completed by the child. For example, Shamela at thirty- two months stated, "and 1 gonna beat and beat and all down there." The coding scheme was therefore able to capture small distinctions in the presentation of self between a purely active self (Shamela), and an active self that acknowledged the social relationship within which the active self functioned (Kendrick).

On occasion, a chi': was asked by an interlocutor to repeat information that included a reference to self. These references were coded as repetitions and discarded from further analysis. Requests of this nature were discarded since they were considered to reflect pragmatic concerns (such as not understanding the child in that circumstance) and not issues about self. Child- initiated repetitions were included in analyses, however, since such repetitions were assumed to encode themes of particular emotional salience to the child (Labov and Waletzky, 1967).


Each verbalized reference about the self was coded as having been originally stated by the child or by the interlocutor. Intercoder reliability for all coding decisions, calculated on one sixth of the corpus, ranged between 86 and 97 percent.

Analyses. Coded episodes and references to self by the child are sorted according to genre (past or fantasy), gender (male or female), and age (24 to 30 months, 32 to 36,months, and 38 to 42 months). These factors have proven distinctive in past analyses with these data (Sperry, 1991). In most analyses, scores for the dependent variable are ratios of occurrence to opportunity, with opportunity defined as episode or utterance, where appropriate. Utterance- level scores were chosen when possible to provide the most control for the linguistic-specifically storytelling-abilities of the subjects. For the analysis of interlocutor- versus child-provided references to self, the dependent variable is the proportion of reference provided by each participant. The arcsin trans- formation was performed on proportional data to allow admission of a bino- mial variable into tests based on the normal distribution (Winer, 1971). All post hoc examinations of means were conducted using the Scheffk correction.

A Multidimensional Self The degree to which subjects displayed a concept of a multidimensional self was determined by comparing numbers of episodes containing zero to four dimensions of self in an ANOVA with (1) age, (2) genre, and (3) number of dimensions as within-subjects factors, and with gender as a between-subjects factor. This analysis revealed interactions between gender, genre, and number of dimensions, F(4,40) = 3.32, p c .05, and between gender, age, and number of dimensions, F(8,80) = 1.40, p < .05.

Further analysis of the gender x genre x number of dimensions interaction demonstrated that boys and girls presented different profiles from one another. There were no differences between fantasy and past episodes told by girls in terms of number of components per episode. By contrast, boys presented a multidimensional self using two, three, or four components per episode consistently more often in fantasy than in past episodes. In addition, boys told significantly more fantasy episodes with two, three, or four components per episode than did girls. Girls told more past episodes with two components than did boys, but there were no differences between boys and girls in the number of past episodes with three or four components per episode.

Boys and girls were also different in the age at which they began to produce narratives with multiple components of self. Boys produced significantly more narratives with two and three components of self than did girls at the youngest age, twenty-four to thirty months. Girls, then, produced significantly more narratives with two components than did boys during the thirty-two- to thirty-six-month age range. By the oldest range, thirty-eight to forty-two months, boys and girls looked very similar to each other in terms of the degree to which they produced narratives with 0, 1 ,2 ,3 , or 4 components.


In sum, boys experienced a flowering with regard to self earlier than did girls, but they appeared to do so within a fantasy context compared to the girls’ preference for past narrations. However, both boys and girls were able to nar- rate a multidimensional self at two years of age. Within the earliest age range, twenty-four to thirty months, both girls and boys produced some narratives with all four components of self.

The Active, Social Self In order to assess the general nature of the child’s objective self, references to self were compared in an ANOVA with (1) age, (2) genre, and (3) type of dimension as within-subjects factors, and with gender as a between-subjects factor. This analysis revealed interactions between age and type of dimension, F(6,60) = 3.91, p c .002, and between gender, genre, and type of dimension, F(3,30) = 3.67, p < .05.

In general, children between the ages of twenty-four and thirty months presented a narrative self that was physical and social. As children matured, their narrative selves became more active. By thirty-eight to forty-two months, active references to self were significantly more frequent than physical and psy- chologd references; references to a social self also increased in frequency and were comparable in rate to active references. Again, girls presented very differently from boys when genre and dimension type are considered. Girls produced significantly more past narratives, and they were significantly more active and social in past than in fantasy episodes. By contrast, boys produced significantly more fantasy narratives; however, unlike the girls, they presented no significant differences in rates of active and social references across past and fantasy contexts.

References to self were also categorized by theme. Of the twenty-one themes that emerged across the four components, ten themes occurred in the narratives of at least eight of twelve subjects. The most representative themes are presented in Table 4.2, along with the frequency of their occurrence across the corpus and the number of children who referred to the theme at least one time. Quantitative analyses were undertaken of the themes in active and social references to self, the two most frequently used dimensions in the narratives of both boys and girls. Analyses did not reach statistical significance, but some trends were noted.

With regard to the active component, boys tended to present themselves as aggressors and as actors in special activities in fantasy events, but as everyday actors in past events. This tendency became more pronounced as the boys matured. For example, Kendrick at forty-two months portrayed himself as a warrior against a monster of the imagination: ‘‘I did more than kill it [the wolf], I cut his head off, then we ate him.” By contrast, girls favored self- presentation as actors in special activities that occurred in the past. For example, at twenty-eight months Alicia reported, “I rode on the Knox Company float.” This tendency became more pronounced as girls matured. Girls also


Table 4.2. Distribution Across Subjects of Ten Most Frequent Themes of Reference to Self

Reference Components-Themes Frequency Number of Subjects

Social-Relational 237 12 Active-Special activity 98 11 Physical-Hurt/aggression 68 11 Physical-Possession 66 11 Active-Everyday activity 60 1.t Physical-Body feature 42 11 Psychological-Desire 33 1:1 Active-Aggression 99 9

Social-Possession 47 a Social-Benefit 31 9

Note: N P 12.

favored self-presentation as aggressors in past narratives, but this tendency decreased over time.

With regard to the social component, both girls and boys discussed self most often in relation to others. In fact, social-relational was the only theme to ‘appear in the narrated self speech of all subjects. However, girls used social- relational references significantly more often in past than in fantasy narratives, while boys used social-relational references somewhat more often in fantasy than in past.

Flying Solo Each nonrepeated child reference to self was coded as originally provided by the child or by the interlocutor within the confines of the episode. Again these data were compared in an ANOVA with (1) age, (2) genre, and (3) type of dimension as within-subjects factors, and with gender as a between-subjects factor. The vast majority of all child references to self were initially provided by the child (84 percent), independent of effects due to gender, age, or genre of narrative, F(1,lO) = 45.55, p c .001. This result provides overwhelming evidence that, for these subjects, little specific, semantic-level assistance from interlocutors was incorporated into their narratives. We suggest that children at this age may be able to affirm a given sense of understanding of self (the “me”), but they are not yet very facile at transforming that particular “me” in terms of feedback from their interlocutors. If such ability to transform the ”me” on the spot were indicative of an “I,” then these results would suggest that portions of the “I” are still quite fragile.


Development of Self in Young African-American Children On the whole, the young African-American toddlers and preschoolers in this study demonstrated remarkable objective understanding of self (based on the portraits children painted of themselves in their conversational narratives about past and fantasy events). All four components of the objective self occurred at the earliest age (twenty-four to thirty months), although girls in particular tended to wait until two and a half years to frequently portray a multidimensional self. Children overwhelmingly provided their own information about self.

One of the striking findings of this study is the degree to which girls and boys pursued different pathways in the course of self-understanding and self- presentation. Girls chose to talk about self in the context of past events, while boys preferred exploring self in the context of fantasy events. Applebee (19781, using narrative fantasies collected by Pitcher and Prelinger (1963), reported a general developmental tendency between two and five years for (middle-class white) children to distance themselves gradually from settings of home and family in favor of settings of far-off lands and, finally, imaginary settings. The contrast between the two ethnic groups made possible by comparing these results with those of Applebee (1978), along with the contrast between girls and boys within this community together suggest that preferences for expression of self in specific contexts are socialized.

The prevalence of child-provided references to self suggests that children either do not have the opportunity to borrow information about themselves from their social world or that they do not yet have sufficient ability to man- age both the requirements of conversation and their self-representations to integrate such information into their concepts of self. Preliminary analyses suggest that the first hypothesis is not viable, because parents do make frequent reference to their children in the context of dialogic narrations. Rather, we view the tendency toward child-initiated narration as support for the interpretation that children between ages two and three and a half (in this sociocultural context) are able to communicate a broadly diversified objective self, or “me,” but may not yet be able to modify it quickly during the course of an interaction. This interpretation is entirely consonant with Mead’s description (1934) of the role-playing self. The self that the child displays at this age is primarily the result of accumulated sets of attitudes adopted from the talk of others about the child.

A11 of the narratives were dialogc: the children only rarely held the floor spontaneously to “tell a story.” Our previous work has shown that the subjects were encouraged by their families to engage in past narrations more frequently than in fantasy narrations (Sperry, 1991). Boys, however, were also encouraged to engage in fantasy talk, while girls received no such encouragement. In addition, mothers reported that they valued tmth-telling very highlr, and they


actively discouraged fictional talk by their daughters twice as frequently as they did with their sons. All of these findings lend support to a conclusion that the conversational demands placed on girls are more stringent than those placed on boys. From these results, one can infer that boys in this study were allowed to exploit their role-playing selves in fictional talk to a much greater extent than were girls. By contrast, girls were more frequently placed in a conversational situation demanding reflection upon their past selves.

What aspects of the communicative situation in these culturally constituted past narrations might privilege them as a source for the development of self-reflection? It is possible that conflicts arise between the child’s attitude sets (or the “me”) and the caregiver’s version of truth. Such conflict may concern issues of continuity (an aspect of the ”I” as described by James). Past narrations in this community would seem to provide a particularly supportive venue for this sort of conflict, given mothers’ vested interest in truth-telling. Further- more, the child may seek to express volition (another aspect of James’s ‘T”) in the same manner in past narrations as in fantasy narrations. There is little evidence that the child views these communicative contexts as distinct; initially they may view both contexts as equally appropriate for expression of desire. However, caregivers certainly construe these contexts differently, and the different socialization patterns that ensue may not only abet self-reflection in past narrations, but also may enable the child‘s growing awareness of distinctions between real and imagined selves.

Implications

Of course, these differentiated contexts have implications for both boys and girls. For boys in this community, any attribution to self may be deemed rea- sonable in the context of imaginary events. Heath (1983) reported that boys were rewarded with social approval and occasionally even special treats for hyperbolic, self-aggrandizing talk. Our similar observations that boys are encouraged tosfeel strong and powerful in fantasy circumstances is out of proportion with the reality they will encounter in classroom situations, first in pro- grams such as Head Start and later in public school. In the short term, the effect seems to be positive in that boys outperform girls four to one in overall narrative production (Speny, 1991). In the longer term, however, the effect may be negative in school settings that do not acknowledge this “way with words” (Heath, 1983). By contrast, girls may experience a reversed effect. Care- givers’ insistence that girls stay focused on reality actually seems to suppress their narrative production in the short term. Although young girls may engage less often in displaced talk than do boys (which, for example, may have implications for their development of linguistic and scientific reasoning), the pres- sure to talk about “truthful” events may be more adaptive in the longer term, once the girls enter school.

CHILDREN'S PRESENTATIONS OF SELF IN CONVERSATIONAL NARRATION 59

We must not overlook the implications of real and fantasy settings for development of self. A self grounded in reality as it really happened is likely to be less charismatic but more secure, while a self based in fantasy may be more creative but also more quixotic. And, of course, the relationship of these culturally different, gendered selves to society at large invites speculation.

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Speny, L. L., and Sperry, D. E. “The Socialization of Narration.” Paper presented at the biennial meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, Seattle, Apr. 30, 1991.

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LINDA L SPERRY is associate professor of educational and school psychology at lndiana State University, Terre Haute.

DOUGIAS E. SPERRY is research associate and instructor of educational and school psychology at lndiana State University, Terre Haute.

Documents

Young children's presentations of self in conversational narration