A Case Study On The Development Of Narrative Ability Of A Mandarine-Speaking Child Aged 1-6

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the development of the narrative ability of a Mandarine-speaking child(FLZ)aged from 1 to 6 years old.Through 6 years tracked,we collected the daily conversation of FLZ and selected the narrative discourses about 40 thousand words,transliterating into the CLAN system and building up a corpus database of this study.Children's narrative ability not only reflects the grammatical ability and lexical competence while saying a single sentence,but also the ability of organizing when speaking multiple sentences.This study aims at the development of grammatical ability,lexical ability,and the story organization ability in FLZ's narrative discourses through accuracy statistics and analysis,exploring the development characteristics of children's narrative ability.In addition,this paper attempts to present the individuality of FLZ's narrative ability,the commonness and regularity of the development of Mandarine-speaking children's narrative ability,as well as the factors of narrative ability.The thesis is divided into six chapters:The first chapter is the introduction,it illustrates the purpose,background,significance,methods,and main content of the research.It also introduces the object of this case study,the way of corpus collection,the process of building corpus database,the software and procedure,including CHILDES and CLAN system.The second chapter is the research summary of children's narrative ability,it summarizes the related research both at home and abroad,including the definition of narrative,the research methods,the dimensions of narrative ability,and the factors influencing the development of children's narrative ability,as well as the research angles of this thesis.The third chapter studies the grammatical development in FLZ's narrative discourses.The first index is Mean Length of Utterance(MLU)used to reflect the overall trend of FLZ's grammatical development from 1 to 6 years old.The second index called Mean Length of the longest five sentences(MLU5),it explains the grammatical development after 4 years old and represents the highest level of children's grammatical development.The process of FLZ's grammatical development can be divided into three stages: holophrastic stage,rapid growth stage,fluctuating and stable development stage.After the age of 4,MLU5 gradually increased to 2.4 times of MLU,representing the highest level of grammatical complexity.So FLZ's expression ability,cognitive ability and grammatical structure gradually improved with the growth of age,the narrative ability also constantly enhanced with the development of grammatical ability.The fourth chapter studies the lexical development in FLZ's narrative discourses.The lexical richness is examined by two indices: Type-token Ratio(TTR)and Number of Different Words(NDW).The increase of TTR can reflect the improvement of application in collocation.The increase of NDW can calculate the frequency of using different words,the different development rate and the order of main word types.The development of lexical has gone through three stages,including the initial holophrastic stage,the rapid growth stage and the higher level stage.The outbreak period of FLZ's lexical development is about 24 months.With the expansion of FLZ's vocabulary,the narrative ability enhanced,so that she can narrate more complex events.However,there are some differences in the growth rate of different word types because of the unbalanced development.The fifth chapter discusses the story organization ability in FLZ's narrative discourses.Through three indices: narrative structure,narrative evaluation and narrative temporality,counting the number of occurrences in narrative discourse to explore its development regularity.The structure of FLZ' s narrative discourses tends to be complete,and the number of occurrences of these three indices gradually increases with age,the narrative ability also increases with the growth of story organization ability.There also exists different development sequence within different dimensions.During the period of 16-24 months,the expression of narrative events and evaluation first appeared,the usage of adjectives,adverbs,emotions and negations also began to appear,at the same time,there were sequential connectives and temporal connectives.During the period of 25-48 months,the words that express the orientation and closing began to appear,while the number of narrative events was the most fast-growing,and the use of emphasis and repetition for effect also began to appear.During the period of 49-74 months,the use of intensifiers,verbal qualifiers and the causal connectives and aspectual expressions gradually appeared.The sixth chapter is about the factors related to the development of FLZ's narrative ability from two aspects,including children's internal factors and external environmental factors.Children's internal factors include the emotional attitude and the cognitive ability,the external environmental factors include the language input of adults and the family cultural environment.The last part is the conclusion.It summarizes the main conclusions of this thesis,pointing out some shortcomings of this research,and puts forward to the future research of the development of children's narrative ability.