scholarly journals Talking About the Non-Literal: Internal States and Explanations in Child-Constructed Narratives

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edy Veneziano
Keyword(s):  
Old French ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Narrative Skills ◽  
Children's Narratives ◽  
Internal States ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Children's Attention ◽  
Evaluative Instrument ◽  
Children's Stories

Abstract Non-literal language most often permeates interesting and informative narratives. These are the non-perceptible, inferential aspects of a story, such as the explanation of events, the attribution of internal, particularly mental, states to the characters of the story, or the evaluation of events by the participants and/or the narrator. The main aim of this paper is to examine whether non-literal uses can be promoted in 7-year-old French-speaking children’s narratives through the use of a short conversational intervention (SCI) which focuses the children’s attention on the causes of events. The results show that, after the SCI, the expression of non-literal aspects, even higher-order ones, may make their appearance or significantly increase in children’s stories. The reasons for the effectiveness of the SCI in the promotion of non-literal uses of language and narrative skills in general, as well as the importance of using the SCI as an evaluative instrument, are discussed.

Promoting narrative skills in 5- to 8-year-old French-speaking children: The effects of a short conversational intervention

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-250
Author(s):  
Edy Veneziano ◽  
Marie-Thérèse Le Normand ◽  
Marie-Helène Plumet ◽  
Juliette Elie-Deschamps
Keyword(s):  
Old French ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Kindergarten Children ◽  
Second Grade ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Narrative Development ◽  
Narrative Skills ◽  
Before And After ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Picture Story

Previous studies of narrative development based on wordless picture stories indicate that before 7–8 years most children provide descriptive narratives with little inferential content such as explanations and attribution of mental states to the story characters. These components find greater expression in studies where children participated in conversations focused on the causes of the events. In the present study, 84 French-speaking children, from kindergarten to second grade, narrated the Stone story (a wordless five-picture story whose plot is based on a misunderstanding between two characters) before and after a short conversational intervention (SCI) focused on the causes of the events, as well as one week later when they also narrated a new story. Thirty additional children served as the Control group: instead of the SCI they played a Memory game with a set of cards containing the pictures of the Stone story. Children in the SCI group increased the inferential content of the narrative produced after the SCI, thus confirming with a larger sample findings obtained in previous studies. Moreover, results provide new evidence that the immediate improvements in inferential content were still present after a week’s delay and could also be applied to a new story. All narratives produced after the SCI were also longer and contained more markers of causality. The effect was stronger in first and second graders than in kindergarten children. By contrast, no significant improvements were found in the children of the Control group on any of the measures. Such results highlight the effectiveness of the SCI in promoting children’s narrative skills, its usefulness in their assessment, and have important implications for a better understanding of narrative development.

scholarly journals Conversationally and Monologically-Produced Narratives: A Complex Story of Horizontal Décalages

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edy Veneziano
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Internal State ◽  
Old French ◽  
Mental States ◽  
False Belief ◽  
Level Of Functioning ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Picture Story ◽  
Representational Level ◽  
Practical Level

Abstract Theory-of- mind-related abilities present a long development characterized by both vertical and horizontal décalages. A vertical type of décalage can be seen in children’s abilities to take into account, on a practical level, others’ intentional and mental states and use internal state terms to talk about them before they are able to succeed, at the dominant representational level of functioning, in false belief tasks. Several horizontal décalages can also be observed. It is only after success in FB tasks that children can talk about the mental states of characters in fictional stories. Moreover, ToM-related and other inferential elements are expressed earlier and more frequently in conversationally-constructed than in monologically-produced narratives. This paper examines in particular this type of horizontal décalage by comparing the types of explanations produced by eighty 6- and 7-year-old French-speaking children during a short conversational intervention (SCI) focused on the causes of the story events to those expressed in monological narratives, about the same wordless picture story, produced immediately after or before the SCI. The results confirm that children expressed more ToM-related and other inferential elements during the SCI than in the two monologically-produced narratives. However, the comparison between explanations produced during the SCI and in the immediately following monological narrative also reveals complex relations among understanding, knowing and expressing this knowledge. The reasons and the significance of the horizontal décalages found in the study are discussed.

Anna Russakoff, Imagining the Miraculous: Miraculous Images of the Virgin Mary in French Illuminated Manuscripts, ca. 1250-ca. 1450. Studies and Texts, 215; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination, 7. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2019, xviii, 194 pp., ill.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 541-544
Author(s):  
Juan Carlos Bayo
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old French ◽  
Illuminated Manuscripts ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Medieval Manuscript ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Image Context ◽  
Panel Paintings

This monograph deals with illuminated manuscripts created in French-speaking regions from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fifteenth century, i.e., from the earliest narratives of Marian miracles written in <?page nr="542"?>Old French to the codices produced at the Burgundian court at the waning of the Middle Ages. Its focus, however, is very specific: it is a systematic analysis of the miniatures depicting both material representations of the Virgin (mainly sculptures, but also icons, panel paintings, altarpieces or reliquaries) and the miracles performed by them, usually as Mary’s reaction to a prayer (or an insult) to one of Her images.

Seeming to Seem

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Order Theory ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Psychological State ◽  
Intentional Stance ◽  
First Person ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Higher Order Theory ◽  
The Third Person

Dennett’s account of consciousness starts from third-person considerations. I argue this is wise, since beginning with first-person access precludes accommodating the third-person access we have to others’ mental states. But Dennett’s first-person operationalism, which seeks to save the first person in third-person, operationalist terms, denies the occurrence of folk-psychological states that one doesn’t believe oneself to be in, and so the occurrence of folk-psychological states that aren’t conscious. This conflicts with Dennett’s intentional-stance approach to the mental, on which we discern others’ mental states independently of those states’ being conscious. We can avoid this conflict with a higher-order theory of consciousness, which saves the spirit of Dennett’s approach, but enables us to distinguish conscious folk-psychological states from nonconscious ones. The intentional stance by itself can’t do this, since it can’t discern a higher-order awareness of a psychological state. But we can supplement the intentional stance with the higher-order theoretical apparatus.

scholarly journals AN OVERVIEW OF INDONESIAN LOANWORDS FROM FRENCH

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 155
Author(s):  
Tri Indri Hardini ◽  
Philippe Grangé
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Old French ◽  
The Other ◽  
French Language ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Reciprocal Influence ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Dutch Language ◽  
Faux Amis

When two languages come into contact, they exert a reciprocal influence, often unbalanced. A phenomenon that often occurs in case of language contact is the absorption or borrowing of lexical elements, which will enrich the vocabulary of the receiving language. In this article, we deal with words adopted from French in Indonesian and vice-versa. This research shows that most of the words of French origin in Indonesian/Malay language were borrowed through Dutch. Historical background explains why there are no direct loanwords from French language in Indonesian. Nowadays, a second batch of words originating from Old French finds their way into Indonesian through English. On the other hand, very few words from Malay-Indonesian origin were borrowed in French, and their route was not straight either: they were conveyed through Portuguese or Dutch. Phonological adaptation and shift of meaning may have happen when the words were loaned from French to Dutch language or later, when adapted from Dutch into Indonesian language. The data analysed in this article may help teachers of French as a Foreign Language in Indonesia, as well as teachers of Indonesian as a Foreign Language in French-speaking countries, to predict which words will be immediately recognized by their students, and when they should pay extra-attention to faux-amis (cognates whose meanings differ).

scholarly journals Incrementality and intention-recognition in utterance processing

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleni Gregoromichelaki ◽  
Ruth Kempson ◽  
Matthew Purver ◽  
Gregory J. Mills ◽  
Ronnie Cann ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Predictive Model ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Intention Recognition ◽  
Dialogue Modelling ◽  
Open Question ◽  
Dynamic Syntax ◽  
Do So

Ever since dialogue modelling first developed relative to broadly Gricean assumptions about utter-ance interpretation (Clark, 1996), it has remained an open question whether the full complexity of higher-order intention computation is made use of in everyday conversation. In this paper we examine the phenomenon of split utterances, from the perspective of Dynamic Syntax, to further probe the necessity of full intention recognition/formation in communication: we do so by exploring the extent to which the interactive coordination of dialogue exchange can be seen as emergent from low-level mechanisms of language processing, without needing representation by interlocutors of each other’s mental states, or fully developed intentions as regards messages to be conveyed. We thus illustrate how many dialogue phenomena can be seen as direct consequences of the grammar architecture, as long as this is presented within an incremental, goal-directed/predictive model.

Functionalism and the Argument from Conceivability

1985 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 85-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Levin
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Central Thesis ◽  
Type Identity ◽  
Internal States ◽  
And Behavior

In recent years, functionalism has emerged as the most appealing candidate for a materialistic theory of mind. Its central thesis - that types of mental states can be defined in terms of their causal and counterfactual relations to the sensory stimulations, other internal states, and behavior of the entities that have them - offers hope for a reasonable materialism: it promises type-identity conditions for beliefs, sensations, and emotions that are not irreducibly mental, yet would permit entities that are physically quite different to be in mental states of the same type.

A Perspective on the Evaluation of School Children's Narratives

1988 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl M. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Form ◽  
Structural Systems ◽  
Children's Narratives ◽  
Clinical Literature ◽  
Children First ◽  
Children's Stories ◽  
Narrative Evaluation

This paper examines two issues that have been neglected to date in the clinical literature on narrative evaluation in children. First, it is shown that there are many types of stories and several contexts for telling stories. Within limits, these variations affect narrative form. A second topic examines those structural systems that contribute in a distinctive way to narrative meaning; such systems are found both within and across utterance boundaries. The applicability of both topics to the evaluation of children's stories is illustrated with reference to four narrative samples. Two stories were produced by normally developing children and two were told by a language-disordered child.

Comparative analysis of children’s narratives at different ages

Gesture ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Marc Colletta
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Facial Expressions ◽  
Old French ◽  
Gaze Direction ◽  
Oral Narratives ◽  
Developmental Aspect ◽  
Four Dimensions ◽  
Children's Narratives ◽  
Narrative Performance

This study addresses two questions. The first question is about how children integrate linguistic, prosodic and kinesic resources into organised discourse behaviour such as oral narratives. Three event reports produced spontaneously by 9- to 11-year-old French children during interviews with an adult were extracted from a video corpus. A detailed analysis of these on four dimensions (discourse construction, voice and prosody, co-speech gestures and facial expressions, gaze direction) reveals a remarkable ability in children of this age to use prosodic and kinesic resources to frame and structure their narrative, to dramatise and enliven the recounted events, and to comment on them or on the narration. The second question stresses the developmental aspect of multimodal narrative behaviour. 32 event reports extracted from the same corpus and produced by French children aged from 6 to 11 years were analysed in a similar way and rated by two independent coders. This second study leads us to distinguish between three levels of narrative performance which appear to coincide by age. The multimodal study of oral narratives thus shows how and when children gradually become genuine narrators.

scholarly journals Initial elevation bias in subjective reports

2017 ◽  
Vol 115 (1) ◽  
pp. E15-E23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick E. Shrout ◽  
Gertraud Stadler ◽  
Sean P. Lane ◽  
M. Joy McClure ◽  
Grace L. Jackson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Field Studies ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Physical Symptoms ◽  
Experimental Investigations ◽  
Attenuation Effect ◽  
Internal States ◽  
Subjective Reports ◽  
Repeated Assessment ◽  
Initial Elevation ◽  
Clear Support

People’s reports of their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are used in many fields of biomedical and social science. When these states have been studied over time, researchers have often observed an unpredicted and puzzling decrease with repeated assessment. When noted, this pattern has been called an “attenuation effect,” suggesting that the effect is due to bias in later reports. However, the pattern could also be consistent with an initial elevation bias. We present systematic, experimental investigations of this effect in four field studies (study 1: n = 870; study 2: n = 246; study 3: n = 870; study 4: n = 141). Findings show clear support for an initial elevation bias rather than a later decline. This bias is larger for reports of internal states than for behaviors and for negative mental states and physical symptoms than for positive states. We encourage increased awareness and investigation of this initial elevation bias in all research using subjective reports.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document