engleski

Initiating event as a component in episodic complexity assessment

Introduction. A macrostructure is an organizational pattern of textual elements in the narrative. According to Westby (2005), only narratives with a clear goal, attempt and outcome (G-A-O sequence) are complete episodes. However, Gagarina et al. (2019) discovered that even typical adult speakers had difficulties producing goals, leading to lower number of G-A-O sequences. They suggest evaluation of story structure that includes the most stable components (not affected by type of episode or story), namely, internal states as an initiating event (IE-A-O sequence). Research questions. This study aims to explore the role of episodic complexity expressed by both G-A-O and IE-A-O in narratives of monolingual Croatian children and adults and to find out whether preschool children differ from school children and weather children differ from adults in expressing episodic complexity. Method. Participants were preschool children (PSC) (n=45 ; age range 5 ; 4 to 6 ; 11, M=6 ; 3, SD=.48), school children (SC) (n=45 ; age range 7 ; 10 to 9 ; 0, M=8 ; 4, SD=.31) and adults (A) (n=45 ; age >20, M=24 ; 7, SD=2.71). They have been tested with the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (Gagarina et al. 2012). G-A-O and IE-A-O sequences were extracted per participant. Results and conclusion. IE-A-O. A Kruskal-Wallis test provided strong evidence of a difference (p<.001) between at least one pair of groups. Dunn’s pairwise test showed the difference between PSC (M=.073, SD=.264) and SC (M=.45, SD=.734) (p<.001) and between SC and A (M=1.667, SD=1.155) (p<.001), but not between SC and A. G-A-O. A Kruskal-Wallis test provided evidence of a difference (p<.05) between at least one pair of groups. Dunn’s pairwise test showed the difference between PSC (M=.195, SD=.459) and SC (M=.54, SD=734) (p<.05), but not between SC and A (M=.43, SD=.746) or PSC and A. To conclude, IE- A-O sequence is more frequent, and it shows steady increases with age in comparison to G-A-O sequence.

narrative skills ; macrostructure ; episodic complexity ; G-A-O sequence ; initiating event

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