认知与发展心理学研究室知识库

叙事能力是幼儿语言能力发展的重要方面。自20 世纪70 年代末开始至今，人们对幼儿叙事能力的发展研究从未间断过。以往的叙事发展研究围绕叙事结构、叙事连贯性和叙事衔接性等问题进行了深入地探讨，但这些研究大部分都是基于对叙事文本的分析。叙事是口语产生的动态过程，在这个过程中会出现各种韵律学现象，如语速变化、停顿等等。这些现象反映了说话者的心理活动、言语组织策略以及叙事时的认知和思维过程。对叙事中韵律特征的研究，可以使我们超越文本信息，获得对叙事过程中言语即时加工特点的认识。 停顿是言语产生中非常重要的一种韵律现象。本研究旨在研究4-6岁幼儿叙事话语中的停顿特征，并分析其与幼儿认知能力和口语能力的关系。本研究从中等教育水平的城市幼儿园中随机选取60名幼儿，按年龄分为两组，每组男女各半。被试根据无字图画书《青蛙，你在哪里》自发讲述故事。研究者对被试的讲述进行录音，并对每一段录音进行忠实转写。根据叙事话语停顿编码手册，研究者对叙事话语中每个停顿的位置和类型进行编码并进行统计分析。 研究结果发现，4-6岁幼儿叙事中的停顿频率表现出明显的年龄和性别差异。随着年龄增长，叙事中的停顿明显减少。4岁女孩的停顿频率比同龄男孩的停顿频率低，但到5岁时这种差异不再明显。从停顿类型看，4-6岁幼儿叙事中停顿的主要类型为无声停顿，其次为填充停顿和词语重复停顿，修正停顿所占的百分比最少。这说明幼儿在计划、组织言语时尚不完全具备边思考边讲话的能力，也还未掌握使用填充停顿作为策略来积极补偿言语的不流畅，从而在话语中出现了很多无声停顿。从停顿的局部水平分布看，4-6岁幼儿叙事中的句中停顿多于句外停顿，女孩比男孩更容易产生句中停顿，而男孩则更容易产生句外停顿。这些在停顿出现位置方面表现出的性别差异说明，女孩可能更倾向于在讲述过程中组织言语，而男孩则更倾向于在言语组织完成后再整体讲出话语。从叙事的整体结构来看，故事起始和结尾部分的停顿频率低，展开部分的停顿频率高。停顿频率与幼儿的口语词汇能力、工作记忆能力及叙事结构的完整程度均表现出显著负相关，说明幼儿的口语能力和工作记忆能力越高，叙事结构越完整，他们话语中的停顿就越少。 本研究是国内第一项对幼儿自发叙事中的停顿现象进行的研究。研究结果不仅弥补了以往基于文本分析的叙事研究的不足，而且还为言语产生及语言发展理论提供了重要的实证数据。

 
Narrative ability is an important aspect of children's language development. Since 1970s, there have been a lot of researches on the development of children's narrative ability. The studies in past mostly discussed about the narrative structure, narrative coherence, narrative cohesion and some other related issues in depth, but most of them are based on the text analysis. Narrative is a dynamic process of speech production, during the speech, many prosodic phenomena, such as variation in speech rate , pausing, will occur. These phenomena reflect the speaker's psychological activities, the cognitive and thinking process, and the strategy of organizing narratives. Therefore, studying on prosodic features in narratives can help us know how we produce speech spontaneously beyond the text information. Pausing is a very important prosodic feature in speech production. The present study was to find out the characteristics of pauses in 4-6 years old children’s narratives, and to analyze the relationship between children's cognitive ability and their oral narrative ability. The method was as below: selecting 60 children randomly from a normal kindergarten in the city, divided into two groups by age 4 and age 5, in each group, half girls and half boys. The children were assigned to elicit their narratives spontaneously according to the wordless picture book Frog, where are you? The researchers recorded each child’s narrative, and transcribed it literally. According to the pausing code manual made for this study, the researchers encoded the location and the type of each pause and then analyze them statistically. The results find that the pausing frequency in narratives shows significant differences in age and sex among 4-6 years old children. With the age increasing, the pausing frequency decreases significantly, 4-year-old girls create less pauses than 4-year-old boys, but there is no significant difference between 5-year-old girls and 5-year-old boys. From the view of pausing types, the silent pause is the main type in 4-6 years old children’s narratives, followed by the filled pause and the word repeating pause, and the fewest one is the repairing pause. This suggests that children haven’t yet mastered the ability of thinking and talking simultaneously in the process of planning and organizing speech, haven’t learned the strategy of using filled pauses to avoid narrative disfluency, so there are a lot of silent pauses occurred in children’s speech. From the view of the pausing distribution in local level, 4-6 years old children create more pauses within clauses than those between clauses, girls are more prone to create pauses within clauses, and boys are more likely to produce pauses between clauses. This difference reflects that girls are more inclined to organize sentences during the speech while boys are more inclined to produce a sentence when they organize it well. Form the view of overall structure of a narrative, there are less pauses in the initial part and resolution part, and more pauses in the unfolding part. The pausing frequency has a significant correlation with the children's oral vocabulary ability, working memory capacity and the completeness of a narrative, which indicates that the higher the child's cognitive ability(oral vocabulary ability and working memory capacity) is, the more complete the narrative structure is, and fewer pauses occur in speech production. The present study is a research about pausing in children’s spontaneous narratives. It does not only make up for the lack of previous research based on the narrative text analysis, but also provides important results for speech and language development theory.