ABSTRACT
Narratives are ubiquitous forms of oral discourse which represent shared cultural understandings of our human experience in the world (Brunei 1986). Narratives provide an important means for translating experiences into language for purposes of communication (Berman 8c Slobin, 1994), for representing them in memory (Nelson, 1986), and for structuring and supplementing them with interpretations (Labov & Waletsky, 1967). Narratives emerge in parent--child conversations with children as young as 2 years of age (Eisenberg, 1985) but, as we will argue in this chapter, precursors to narrative devel opment can be identified in the language exchanges of even younger children. Discussions of a joint focus of attention between 20-month-old children and their parents lead naturally into elaborations that introduce nonpresent elements--connections to the past, plans for the future, and memories of related objects or events. While these discussions are not narrative in the strict sense, they provide the child an opportunity to deal with some of the complexities of narrative. Another facilitative activity during early mother-child conversation is fantasy play, a context for learning about plot, character, and other narrative elements. Variability in childrens opportunities for participation in discussions of joint focus and fantasy may help explain individual differences in later skills. In this chapter we explore how it is that children develop skills with two narrative genres, personal narrative and fantasy story, and why it is that some children excel at one or the other, some at both, and some at neither. We will argue that individual differences in narrative skills emerge at least in part from childrens early capacities to engage in discussions of a joint focus of attention, typically a toy, a picture, or an ongoing activity, with adults. In the sections that follow, we describe a social interactionist theoretical framework for understanding narrative development. We then define and illustrate childrens capacities with two important narrative genres at 5 years of age and present data about childrens participation at 20 and
30 months in talk about the nonpresent and about fantasy Finally we turn to exploring relationships between childrens early experiences with social interaction and their later narrative attainments.
