روند رشد كاربرد ابزار انسجام دستوري در كودكان فارسي‌زبان

Developmental process of the use of grammatical cohesive devices in the Persian-speaking children

پژوهش حاضر درچارچوب نظريه انسجام هليدي و حسن (1976)، توانايي سازماندهي روايي كودكان فارسي زبان را با به كارگيري روش تجربي- ميداني مورد بررسي و مقايسه قرار داده است. به اين منظور، پانزده كودك، هشت پسر و هفت دختر چهار تا هفت سال در يك مهدكودك در غرب تهران انتخاب و گزينش شدند. سپس به منظور بررسي عملكرد اين كودكان در سازماندهي گفتمان ازطريق بكارگيري ابزار انسجام دستوري، دو آزمون بازگويي و توليد داستان با استفاده از دو كتاب مصوّر كودك اجرا گرديد و با درنظر گرفتن رشد انسجام دستوري، داستانهاي آنها مورد بررسي و مقايسه قرار گرفت. هدف اصلي اين تحقيق آن بوده است كه با ارزيابي توانايي سازماندهي گفتمان روايي در كودكان فارسي زبان به شناخت و ارزيابي بهتري از توانش گفتماني آنها دست يابيم. بر پايه يافته‌هاي اين تحقيق مي‌توان گفت كه اولاً كودكان در هر سه گروه سنّي قادر به به كارگيري صحيح ابزارهاي انسجام دستوري به‌منظور سازماندهي داستان هاي خود هستند. نتيجه ديگر اين كه تمامي گروه هاي سنّي از ميان زيرمجموعه‌هاي انسجام دستوري (ارجاع، جانشيني، حذف) در هر دو آزمون بيشتر تمايل به كاربرد ارجاع دارند و در نهايت، عملكرد كودكان در آزمون بازگويي داستان در مقايسه با آزمون توليد داستان به لحاظ تعداد بندها و مولفه‌هاي انسجام دستوري متفاوت مي‌باشد.

Childrenʹs increasing discourse mastery as one of the most important features of language acquisition appears to be of high significance in their later language development. The ability of discourse organization is the essential part of childrenʹs developmental knowledge which is fulfilled during childʹs first language acquisition. A kind of discourse which is acquired from the age of three is narrative discourse which is a rich source of information about childrenʹs linguistic, pragmatic and cognitive knowledge (Liles, 1993). Investigating childrenʹs performance while narrating can include a wide range of linguistic abilities beyond sentence like organization of sentences in a text and also applying linguistic devices to provide cohesion in that text; furthermore it is a valuable tool to evaluate complicated linguistic skills like long-term pragmatic skills even in young children. The main objective of this study is to investigate childrenʹs discourse competence through evaluating their ability to organize their narrative discourse. We have also attempted to introduce a possible developmental pattern regarding the use of grammatical cohesive devices (reference, substitution and ellipsis).The other objective of the present study is to compare and contrast the findings of the childrenʹs performance in this study with the childrenʹs performance in other languages in order to analyze the differences and similarities between them. To do so, 15 children, 8 boys and 7 girls have been selected from a kindergarten and in order to investigate their performance in discourse organization, two tests , story-retell and story production, using two pictorial books have been conducted and the performance of the subjects have been analyzed regarding the development in the use of grammatical cohesive devices. 2- THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Narrative discourse organization can be analyzed from two perspectives: coherence and cohesion. In fact, two separate analytical but interdependent levels in narrative researches are coherence and cohesion. Coherence discusses the macrostructure of the text which regards organization different parts of the story and cohesion is related to the micro structure of the linguistic devices which provides a tie among all story components; that is where this content is formed and organized. Narrative analysis is often about finding a relation between structural coherence and linguistic cohesion and also text processing mastery. Childrenʹs narrative discourse can be studied from different perspectives, one of which is how to organize the story and provide cohesion by children. Narrative discourse is an example of high- level linguistic and cognitive abilities like understanding cause and effect relationship and also the ability to organize and give sequence to the events so that it could be understandable to the listener. In order to make a story understandable, the storyteller should be able to tie a series of sentences; cohesive devices among which grammatical devices, are to accomplish this aim. 3- METHODOLOGY The data in this study are forthcoming from already collected transcripts of narratives of typically developing children in the age of 4-7. Fifteen native Persian monolingual children participated in this study. Eight of the participants were boys and seven of them girls. The children were selected with the help of a kindergarten in Tehran. Children’s parents were asked to fill in a questionnaire to give consent regarding the participation of their child and to give case history information. To collect the data two tests, story-retell and story-production, were performed using two different pictorial books appropriate for their age. The tests were performed subsequently with the children separately and the researcher. All their narratives were recorded, transcribed and analyzed. The results were shown in tables and graphs. 4- DISCUSSION The findings of this study like previous studies showed that children acquire the ability to organize a story through a developmental line. In fact, all age groups were able to apply all kinds of grammatical cohesive devices. It is worth mentioning that the age factor was just effective in the number of devices and not the kind of devices used. In other words, all age groups tended generally to use a special subcategory of grammatical devices, that is "reference" and they did not show any tendency to use other subcategories of grammatical devices like substitution or ellipsis as much. The other finding was related to the children better performance in the story-retell test comparing with story-production test regarding the number of utterances and the number of grammatical devices, this was due to having a model in advance. 5- CONCLUSION This study examines and discusses the use of grammatical cohesive devices in the narratives of monolingual Persian-speaking children with typical development. Relatively, little research has been done on childrenʹs acquisition of cohesive devices, although they clearly play an important role in their developing understanding and use of the language. The statistical analysis of applying grammatical cohesive devices in this study demonstrated that participating age groups could use all types of grammatical cohesive devices, especially "reference" that all participants used significantly. But contrary to what previous studies have suggested (Bloomet al, 1980, Shapiro and Hudson, 1997: Bennet and Kastor, 1986) there was no developmental line concerning the use of these devices; in other words, no specific difference was noted on the kind of devices being used regarding the age of the participants. Additionally, children tended to provide more event details when they were asked to retell a story comparing to the time when they were asked to produce a story on their own. It means they included more words, more cohesive devices and they made fewer mistakes in their story-retell task. There are a number of possible explanations for this finding , one of which we tend to favor, is that children function better when they are asked to retell a story rather than producing a story, as they have a pre-model in their mind based on which they can organize their words and narrate their story (Merit and Liles, 1989). The findings also suggest a link between the genre of narrative (narrating personal experiences, story-telling and retelling) and the childrenʹs performance, in other words when the children are asked to narrate their personal experience, they probably perform differently as compared to the time when they are asked to produce a story (Merrit and Liles, 1989; Ripich and Grifith, 1988).The findings in this study provided only preliminary data in the field of oral narrative research in Persian. It is worth studying the use of various type of cohesive device at the same time. This may show childrenʹs shift in using different types of devices at various age stages. Further research may also include the use of other stories or other narrative genres to investigate the interaction between the macrostructure and the use of cohesive devices.