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Simultaneity in children's narratives: the case of when, while and as*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Marilyn N. Silva
Marilyn N. Silva*
Affiliation:
California State University, Hayward
*
Department of Human Development, California State University, Hayward CA 94542, USA.
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Abstract

This study examines the use of the co-temporal connectives when, while and as in the elicited narratives of 71 children between 4;10 and 11;11. A group of 26 adults provided comparison data. Subjects were asked to ‘tell a story’ about each of three sets of story pictures. Analysis of the adult data confirmed a preference for preposed over postposed when clauses and supported the notion of a continuum of simultaneity for when, while and as. The oldest children (like the adults) were more likely to prepose when clauses than were younger children, a finding which suggests that with increasing awareness of the information needs of the listener, children begin to use preposed adverbial clauses as information ‘guideposts’. Surprisingly, however, children in general were far more likely than adults to use durative predicates with when clauses and did not use co-temporal as – substituting when or while in those contexts in which as appeared in the adult protocols. These two findings are shown to be connected, since aspect in the adult data is differentially distributed with respect to the three connectives. It is hypothesized that for narrative purposes children acquire when before while and while before as, in the order of increasing specificity and constraint, with the determining factor being a convergence of syntax, semantics and information flow.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , October 1991 , pp. 641 - 662
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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Footnotes

*

This paper is based on my doctoral dissertation, completed at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1983. Portions of it, now substantially revised, appeared in the Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1981) and Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 23 (1984). Materials published therein are used with the permission of BLS and Stanford University. I am indebted to Christine Yamate, the gifted artist who created the sets of pictures used for this study, and to the children and teachers at the following schools: Vista School, Albany, California; The Academy, Berkeley, California; Berkeley Christian School, Berkeley, California; Bancroft Cooperative Kindergarten, Berkeley, California; and Longfellow School, Oakland, California. My thanks go to Wally Chafe, Orin Gensler and Eve Sweetser for comments on an earlier version, and to Dan Alford, Rainer Bauer, Glynn Custred, Dora Dien, Jim Murphy, and two anonymous reviewers for valuable commentary on the current version. All errors, it goes without saying, are my own.

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