Learning to tell a story of false belief : A study of French-speaking children.

Edy Veneziano (1, 2) , Laetitia Albert (1) , Stéphanie Martin (1)

1 UPD5 - Université Paris Descartes - Paris 5
2 MoDyCo - Modèles, Dynamiques, Corpus

The research reported in this chapter explores whether there is an impassable developmental threshold for the late appearance of children's expression of the mental stances of characters in their narratives. To this effect, two features intended to facilitate the expression of these aspects were introduced. One was the choice of the "Stone Story", a sequence of five wordless pictures implying a misunderstanding between two characters. This characteristic of the story could promote the expression of multiple perspectives and a relativistic account of reality. The other feature was the use of intervention procedures intended to help children to focus their attention on the expression of causal connections. For one group of children the intervention consisted in a Piagetian-type of scaffolding, and for another group in a narrative told by the experimenter mentioning the reasons of events and their connections in the overall story. Results show that both procedures have a great effect on children's expression of mental aspects of the story in their subsequent narrative, including the indirect expression of the false belief and its subsequent rectification in the minds of the characters.

Mots clés: narrative development; intervention; ethods; learning

Domaines: Linguistique

Edy Veneziano, Laetitia Albert, Stéphanie Martin. Learning to tell a story of false belief : A study of French-speaking children.. J. Guo, E. Lieven,N. Budwig, S. Ervin-Tripp, K Nakamura & S. Özçaliskan (Eds),. Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology of language: Research in the tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin, Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 277-289, 2008. ⟨halshs-00201935⟩