Maternal discourse styles in the storytelling and reminiscing contexts in relation to preschoolers’ perspective-taking abilities

Abstract

This thesis aimed to investigate a) whether Turkish-speaking mothers adopt distinct discourse styles across two common daily narrative contexts of storytelling and reminiscing? b) whether and how mothers’ discourse styles in each context would be associated with children’s visual, socio-cognitive, and syntactic perspective-taking (PT) abilities? One-hundred twenty mothers and their 3- to 5-year-old children participated in all study sessions. Each mother-child dyad was asked to narrate a wordless storybook and converse about a shared and specific event they experienced in the lab (‘Treasure Hunt’ game). Children’s vocabulary and perspective-taking abilities (visual PT, false belief understanding, comprehension of syntactic complementation) were assessed. Cluster analyses indicated two distinct styles of mothers when they narrated a storybook with their children (storytellers, story builders), whereas three styles of mothers were found when the same mothers talked about their Treasure Hunt memory (co-teller, elicitor, constructor). Maternal education, as well as children’s age and verbal contributions, were shown to play a significant role in mothers’ assuming a discourse style depending on the context. Children of storytellers scored higher in both visual and syntactic PT tasks than children of story builders. Children of memory elicitors also outperformed children of memory co-tellers in visual PT tasks. Implications and future directions are discussed within the sociocultural view that argues for the individually and contextually sensitive nature of maternal narrative scaffolding for preschoolers’ social understanding.