cartoon descriptions
Transcription
cartoon descriptions
UNIVERSITÄT DES SAARLANDES Philosophische Fakultät II Fachrichtung 4.3 Anglistik, Amerikanistik und Anglophone Kulturen WISSENSCHAFTLICHE ABSCHLUSSARBEIT Leitung: Prof. Dr. Neal Norrick CARTOON DESCRIPTIONS Kerstin Borau Metzer Str. 57 66117 Saarbrücken Tel.: 0681 - 3961496 Email: [email protected] 1 CARTOON DESCRIPTIONS 2 1 INTRODUCTION......................................................................................... 6 2 DESCRIPTION OF THE DATA................................................................... 9 3 REFERENCE, WORD MEANING AND THE MENTAL LEXICON ........... 13 4 DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS OF THE REFERENTIAL WORDS IN THE CARTOON-DESCRIPTION TASK........................................................... 16 4.1 Deictical expressions: Anaphora, cataphora and exophora ..................................................17 4.1.1 Demonstratives........................................................................................................................18 4.1.2 Personal pronouns ...................................................................................................................20 4.2 Referential expressions relating to objects...............................................................................23 4.2.1 The definite and indefinite article in reference........................................................................24 4.2.2 Thing or something..................................................................................................................27 4.2.3 Circumlocutions ......................................................................................................................30 4.2.4 Specific level terms .................................................................................................................31 4.2.5 Meronomic expressions...........................................................................................................32 4.2.6 Mismatching and overextended nominal expressions .............................................................34 4.2.6.1 Overextended nominal expressions ...............................................................................35 4.2.6.2 Mismatching nominal expressions.................................................................................39 4.3 Referential words for actions and events .................................................................................42 4.3.1 Overextended words for actions and events ............................................................................44 4.3.2 Onomatopoeic imitation and coinage of novel verbs from onomatopoeic words ...................45 4.3.3 Intransitivity, transitivity and causation ..................................................................................48 3 5 STORY STRUCTURE, STORY SCHEMATA, SCRIPTS AND FRAMES . 53 5.1 6 The classification of cartoon-descriptions................................................................................54 THE INFLUENCE OF FRAMES ON REFERENTIAL WORDS ................ 57 6.1 7 The “frame-relations” of objects and actions and their influence on referential words......57 THE ANALYSIS OF FRAMES IN THE CARTOON DESCRIPTION TASK AND THEIR INFLUENCE ON SEMANTIC AND GRAMMATICAL FEATURES ...................................................................................................... 61 7.1 Verbal realizations of expectations ...........................................................................................61 7.1.1 Negative statements.................................................................................................................62 7.1.2 Evaluative elements.................................................................................................................64 7.1.3 Inference and interpretation.....................................................................................................64 7.2 Experiment frame ......................................................................................................................68 7.2.1 Interactional frame ..................................................................................................................68 7.2.2 Functional presumption...........................................................................................................69 7.2.2.1 Adults’ functional presumption .....................................................................................70 7.2.2.2 Children’s functional presumption.................................................................................71 7.2.2.2.1 A labeling task ..........................................................................................................72 7.2.2.2.2 A story telling task ....................................................................................................75 7.2.2.3 8 The cartoon-frame..........................................................................................................76 CONCLUSION .......................................................................................... 79 4 I. APPENDIX: TRANSCRIPTIONS ................................................................. I I.I. Transcriptions of the three-year-olds ......................................................................................... I I.II. Transcriptions of the six-year-olds ......................................................................................... XV I.III. Transcriptions of the twenty-year-olds ..............................................................................XXIX II. REFERENCES.......................................................................................XLIII II.I. Literature..............................................................................................................................XLIII II.II. Internet Sources .................................................................................................................... XLV II.III. CD–ROM: Cartoon.........................................................................................................XLVI 5 Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. Dr. Neal Norrick, whose expertise, humor, and patience, added considerably to my graduate experience. A very special thanks goes out to Dr. Kristy BeersFägersten and Caren Brinckmann for proofreading. I must acknowledge my husband and best friend, Carsten Ullrich, without whose love, encouragement, editing and formatting assistance, I would not have finished this thesis. I would also like to thank my mother Helga Borau for never having stopped to believe in me. Danksagung An dieser Stelle möchte ich meinem Betreuer, Prof. Dr. Neal Norrick, meinen Dank aussprechen. Er hat mit Fachkenntnis, Humor und Geduld beträchtlich zu meiner Studienerfahrung beigetragen. Mein besonderer Dank gilt außerdem Dr. Kristy BeersFägersten und Caren Brinckmann für das Korrekturlesen. Zu besonderem Dank bin ich meinem Ehemann und besten Freund Carsten Ullrich verpflichtet. Ohne seine Liebe und Ermutigung sowie seine Fähigkeiten im Bereich des Editierens und Formatierens hätte ich diese Magisterarbeit nicht zu Ende geschrieben. Ich möchte außerdem meiner Mutter Helga Borau dafür danken, dass sie nie aufgehört hat, an mich zu glauben. 6 1 Introduction The research into first language acquisition, the development of language in children, is a highly interdisciplinary field of study. Besides linguistics, it is related to a number of areas such as psychology, psycholinguistics and cognitive science, which is the study of how the mind and brain give rise to behavior. The cognitive approach to linguistics examines the relation of language and mind and how human language is structured, acquired, and put to use. Historically, theories and theorists have debated which factors most prominently influence first language acquisition. Generally speaking, the discussion involves between researchers supporting nativist theories, such as the linguist Noam Chomsky, and researchers supporting behaviorist approaches to the study of first language acquisition, such as the psychologist B.F Skinner. In recent years, other researchers theorize that language learning results from general cognitive abilities and the interaction between learners and their surrounding communities. Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney, who collected the data analyzed in this thesis, belong to the latter group. 7 The following thesis will analyze cartoon-descriptions by American speakers in three different age groups. The descriptions were recorded and transcribed in a study conducted by Elizabeth Bates and Brian MacWhinney in the 1980s. The thesis is divided into two parts. In the first part, the different referential words used by children in the cartoon-description task are examined. Based on the findings of Eve V. Clark (1993) and Louis Bloom (1998), this part starts with a brief introduction on the theory of how reference, word meaning and the mental lexicon are related. The analysis of children’s referential words is again subdivided into three sections; each section is prefaced with a subsection explaining the respective linguistic theory. The first section examines the children’s employment of deictic expressions paying special attention to the exophoric use of demonstratives and the personal pronoun “he”. Since false starts which contain the definite article and seem to be aiming at a noun phrase occur frequently in reference to objects, the role of the definite and indefinite article is outlined at the beginning of the next section. Then, different referential expressions relating to objects are illustrated. In the third section referential expressions relating to actions and events are 8 discussed including the children’s understanding of intransitivity, transitivity and causation. In the second part of this thesis, the influence of frames on referential words and structural elements is analyzed. A brief introduction into the theory of frames is provided with special consideration to Deborah Tannen’s (1993) frame theory. After the cartoon-descriptions are classified as a special type of oral account similar to accounts children produce in a natural environment, Tannen’s frame theory is applied to the cartoon descriptions. This analysis illustrates the influence of pre-existing knowledge structures on semantic and grammatical features. In the concluding section the findings of this study are summarized and the advantages of interdisciplinary studies are presented. The cartoon-transcriptions as well the script of the cartoon is included in an appendix. The script of the cartoon is available on the CHILDES corpus; it briefly describes the events in the cartoon. A copy of the cartoon is attached to the last page of the thesis. 9 2 Description of the data The data presented in this thesis is taken from the MacBates 2 corpus included in the CHILDES database (www. childes.psy.cmu.edu). The creation of the CHILDES database by Brian MacWhinney and Elizabeth Bates was one of the most important advances in the study of first language acquisition since it has made data on child language widely available. The MacBates 2 corpus consists of a study conducted by MacWhinney and Bates during 1980 and 1982 using a cartoon-description task with American children and adults. In this study, all the subjects individually watched a six-minute long color cartoon. The original recording included sound effects which today are lost and cannot be restored. All participants were asked to simultaneously watch and describe what they saw; their descriptions were then transcribed and incorporated in the CHILDES corpus. The data analyzed in this thesis comprise transcripts of 14 cartoon-descriptions by three-year-old children and transcripts of 14 cartoon-descriptions by six-year-old children as well as 14 transcripts of the descriptions by adults for comparison. 10 The cartoon can be structured into two larger parts; each part is again subdivided into two sequences. The protagonist of the first part’s first sequence is a woodpecker. The bird is sitting on a tree and pecking it when a dog comes running and barks at the bird. The bird then pecks off the tree top, and the tree top chases the bird and the dog. In the second sequence the woodpecker and the dog encounter a bear that is chasing them out of a cave. The bear is the element linking the first and the second part of the cartoon. He is the protagonist of the third sequence, that is, the second part’s first sequence, which consists of two structurally almost parallel subsequences: The bear first hits a banana tree and a fruit falls down which he eats, and then he hits an apple tree and again a fruit falls down which he again eats. The first subsequence suggests that the bear picks up a stick and hits the tree rather randomly, while the second subsequence implies that the bear hits the apple tree intentionally after having learnt that this action is rewarded with a fruit. In the fourth and final sequence, the bear once more hits a tree, but this time a monkey sitting on the tree falls down. After an initial quarrel, they eventually both share bananas they managed to get hold of and shake hands. The cartoon script was annotated with line numbers by MacWhinney and Bates; the line numbers in the cartoon 11 descriptions were additionally annotated for the thesis. The numeral codes assigned to the cartoon descriptions were also given and label each description. In the appendix, each transcript has such numeral code as heading as illustrated below. The first two digits refer to the subjects’ age. Consequently, the numeral code in example (03e01) refers to a child in the group of three-year-olds: 03e01 1. The # he pound on the tree. 2. The doggie um # um # come on and watch that. 3. He # he says ruff ruff ruff at hh that [^ pointing to the bird]. In this thesis, quotations from the description will be identified by use of these numeral codes with the according line numbers: The # he pound on the tree. (03e01, l. 1) Since the participants were simultaneously watching and describing the events of the cartoon, the order of events in their description is parallel to the order of events shown in the cartoon. Thus the line numbers of the cartoontranscriptions more or less correspond to the line numbers of the cartoon’s script. 12 The experimental design offers a number of advantages. First, the subjects are not faced with the difficulty of retrieving the events from memory, which poses a complexity, especially for young children. This allows the researcher to identify the target utterance without much effort, which is a major advantage in case of phenomena like mismatches, as explained in section 4.2.6. Second, unlike an experiment in which the subjects are asked to tell a story in their own words, the children might have to refer to objects, actions and events in the cartoon without having acquired a word which could be considered correct from an adult point of view. In this context it has to be noted that the drawing style of the cartoon is somewhat rough and the objects shown cannot exclusively be recognized by visual clues. Consequently, the subjects need to access pre-existing knowledge structures in order to apply an appropriate referential word, which poses an additional difficulty for the children. On the other hand, in the given situational context, in which the referents are visible to speakers and addressees, the children could easily use extralinguistic gestures such as pointing to specify unfamiliar as-yet unlabelled objects and actions. 13 3 Reference, word meaning and the mental lexicon The notions of reference, word meaning, and mental representation have been the focus of an ongoing discussion between linguists as well as scholars from different fields such as psychology, philosophy, semantics and semiotics. A detailed discussion of their differing views and terminology would go beyond the scope of this thesis. The following section will therefore provide a brief but for this purpose expedient outline of the relation of word meaning and reference. Reference is defined as an expression a speaker employs to identify an object; it describes the relation of a linguistic expression and the object in the real world. This object can be animate as well as inanimate, human or non-human; or it may consist of a place. The objects referred to in a discourse are called the referents of the word while the words describing the referents are called referential words or referential expressions. In the analyzed data, for instance, woodpecker is a referent, while “duckie” (03e03, l.1) is a referential word employed for woodpecker by a child. Cave is another referent, with 14 “the fishes ear” (03e03, l.10) as one of the corresponding referential expression. Referential expressions are assumed to be related to “a certain mental representation or concept” which again is “associated with a certain form” (Bloom, P. 2000: 17). The mental representation or concept can be described as a mental image, similar to Saussure’s signified; and the certain form can be described as a phonological representation of a mental image, similar to Saussure’s signifier. Louis Bloom describes the mental concept in combination with its form as mental meanings: “When a child looks at the clock on the wall and says ‘ticktock,’ the act of reference has a mental meaning that gives rise to the behavior we observe. The mental meaning represents and refers to the object in the world; the word the child says names the representation in the mental meaning” (Bloom, L. 1998: 317) The different mental representations and forms are stored and organized within the mental lexicon, which can be described in short as the mental vocabulary in a speaker's mind. These mental vocabularies differ; and an individual's knowledge of vocabulary is described as the speaker’s lexical knowledge. Entries in the lexicon are organized according to certain principles; i.e., the entries contain information about meaning, syntactic form, morphological structure, and phonological shape (Clark 1993). 15 Semantically related entries, that is, entries with related meanings, are grouped together in semantic fields or semantic categories. Animal terms such as dog, bear, and bird, for instance, are grouped together in one semantic field. Adult speakers have already acquired an extensive lexical knowledge stored in their mental lexicon, that is, they have a variety of ideas of objects and actions represented in their mind, combined with the appropriate words in their native language. Adult speakers of English have production vocabularies of 20,000 to 50,000 words, and presumably an even larger comprehension vocabulary. Children at age 2 have a vocabulary of 50 – 600 words and they continue to acquire approximately 10 new words per day. By the age of six they have acquired approximately 14,000 words (Clark 1993). In the course of acquisition, children not only have to name each new object they encounter, but they also have to attribute them to different semantic categories. When a child encounters an unfamiliar object, a subconscious mental process starts: the child compares the unfamiliar object to the already existing mental concepts and checks the new and as-yet unlabelled object for representative features in the existing mental concepts. The child will then choose to label the new object with the 16 referential word for the mental concept that shares the most common features with the new object (Clark 1993). 4 Description and analysis of the referential words in the cartoondescription task The following sections examine the expressions children use to establish reference to objects, actions and events in MacWhinney’s and Bates’ cartoon-descriptions task. Strictly speaking, the notion of reference relates to objects and not to actions or events, which leaves linguists without an appropriate expression for the latter two. Clark avoided this problem in “The lexicon in acquisition” (1993) by labeling reference to objects as “words for things” and words referring to actions as “words for actions”, since a concept for reference to actions does not exist. In this thesis, the problem will be addressed by the employment of the terms referential words for objects, referential words for actions and accordingly referential words for events. Referential words for actions generally consist of verbs while referential words for objects can consist of proper names, nouns, pronouns, and demonstratives. Whereas proper names and nouns are independent of their context, 17 referential words consisting of pronouns and demonstratives cannot be interpreted separately from their context because they refer to intra- or extralinguistic elements within a given speech situation. Context dependent referential words are subsumed under the linguistic phenomenon of deixis, which will be explained in the following section. 4.1 Deictical expressions: Anaphora, cataphora and exophora Deixis is often described as a “form of verbal pointing” (Halliday 1976:58), that is to say, pointing by means of language. This verbal pointing is realized by single deictic words or deictic expressions. They can either refer to elements outside of a text or to elements within a text. Deictics referring to extralinguistic elements, that is, to elements outside of a text, establish exophoric reference while deictics referring to intralinguistic elements, that is, elements inside a text, establish endophoric reference. Expressions establishing endophoric reference can refer either backwards or forwards to elements in a text; the backward reference is called anaphora or anaphoric reference while the forward reference is called cataphora or cataphoric reference. The following examples illustrate the two different types of reference: 18 Um # the bird was pecking on a tree and then he stopped. It stopped [^ did anything else happen?] a dog came. (06e20, l. 1 + 2) Since “he” in the first line refers back to “the bird”, “he” is an anaphoric reference. “It” in line two also refers back to “the bird”, hence it is also an anaphoric expression. 1. He's hammering [^ who is?] a bird. 2. It was a dog [^ and wh?] he's ruffing [^ he is?]. (03e02) In this example, “he” in the first line refers forwards to “a bird”; just as “it” in line two refers forwards to “a dog”, thus they are cataphoric expressions. 4.1.1 Demonstratives This section will discuss the use of demonstratives on the condition that they substitute a nominal expression in first mention. Demonstratives can be subdivided into adverbial and nominal demonstratives. Relevant for what follows are the nominal demonstratives this and that and the adverbial demonstrative of place there. Nominal demonstratives can either modify a noun and act as determinative demonstratives as in example (06e25) or they can replace a 19 noun and act as independent demonstratives as in line 3 of example (03e01): That bird was um # pecking um the the tree. That that dog was um watching the um bird peck the tree. (06e25, l. 1 + 2) He # he says ruff ruff ruff at hh that [^ pointing to the bird] (03e01, l. 3) However, in line 11 of example (03e01), the adverbial demonstrative of place there takes up the same function as an independent demonstrative. Without specification of the modified or replaced noun in previous discourse both types of demonstratives are exophoric, as the example given below shows: He went under there [^ ok, pointing to the cave]. (03e01, l. 11) Halliday claims that the use of demonstratives “is the primary form of verbal pointing and it may be accompanied by demonstrative action, in the form of a gesture indicating the object referred to” (Halliday 1976:58). According to the transcription of the CHILDES corpus, in which pointing gestures are annotated in square brackets, child (03e01) is the only subject which actually employs an independent demonstrative in combination with a pointing gesture to an unidentifiable and as-yet unlabeled 20 object. What is equally surprising is that merely three of the three-year-olds employ an independent demonstrative without pointing gesture: The bear just # got into that [^ what is that?] its a # I don't know what that is [^ cave] yea cave . (03e24, l. 10) Um # that goes down on the floor [^ do you know what that was? # apple]. (03e03, l. 20) I don't know what that was [^ banana] fell right on his head. (03e19, l. 16) In the examples above the children state that they “don’t know what that is/was” (03e24, 03e19). This clearly shows that they employ an independent demonstrative instead of a noun phrase because they do not recognize the objects on the screen and consequently cannot refer to them with a noun phrase. However, a number of other children participating in the study obviously have difficulties in finding referential words, yet no other child chooses the easy way by making use of determinative or independent demonstratives. 4.1.2 Personal pronouns Third person pronouns, as well as the nominal demonstratives, can be used either endophorically or exophorically. Hence, the term exophoric pronoun is employed when reference is established with a pronoun 21 without previous linguistic mention of the referent of the pronoun. Therefore, just as in the study of demonstratives, exophoric pronouns need to be examined on the condition that they substitute a nominal expression in their first mention. The exophoric pronoun he is employed by eight children from the group of three-year-olds compared to four children in the group of six year-olds in the first mention of woodpecker. Similarly, in the first mention of bear, four children from the three-year-old group and only one child from the six-year-old group exophorically employ “he”. In contrast to the high number of the exophoric pronoun “he” with reference to woodpecker, none of the children from either group uses an exophoric pronoun in the first mention of dog; neither do they apply a mismatching term or invent a word as they do for woodpecker. This comparison shows on the one hand that the number of exophoric pronouns is highest among the group of threeyear-olds; and on the other hand it shows that the number of exophoric pronouns is highest when the children have difficulty recognizing and labeling objects, which is clearly the case with woodpecker. Further evidence for the fact that children employ exophoric pronouns only until they find a more suitable term can be drawn from the following examples: 22 “He was knocking on the tree and its a woodpecker.” (03e21, l. 1) “He # the bird was kn # trying to knock the tree over.” (06e11, l. 1) In both examples the children replace the exophoric pronoun with a noun phrase as soon as he or she can think of an appropriate term. In example (03e01) the child starts with a definite article, presumably aiming at a definite noun phrase, then realizing that he or she is not able to label the perceived object with an appropriate noun: “The # he pound on the tree” (03e01, l. 1) This false start shows that the child finding himself or herself unable to label the object decides to employ an exophoric pronoun to refer to the object rather than pointing or admitting the inability of naming. This suggests that exophoric use of pronouns does not automatically emerge out of the special type of speech situation in cartoon-description tasks, but is rather a result of poor recognition and consequent inability to label the object. Karmiloff-Smith made a similar observation: “in a story-telling task based on a series of pictures, younger children tended to use pronouns more rapidly than 23 did older children” (1979:222). Young children tend to use pronouns exophorically whenever they are unable to label the referent. In other words, children employ exophoric pronouns as substitutes for the correct term. None of the adult subjects ever uses an exophoric third person pronoun in the cartoon-description task, simply because they are able to recognize and label the referents of the cartoon. Exophoric third person pronouns are only applied by both groups of children; and they are only applied when lacking an appropriate word or description. These findings agree with Lyons’ (1980) claim that pronouns have an initial deictic function; however, their application diminishes with age and the accordingly growing vocabulary. 4.2 Referential expressions relating to objects This section analyzes single referential words and referential expressions composed of more than one word, such as noun phrases consisting of an article and a noun or circumlocutions. However, in a number of examples the children start their descriptions with the definite article “the”, then hesitate and continue their description with an exophoric pronoun in place of a noun phrase. Hence, the 24 exophoric function of the definite article is discussed before the actual use of nominal expressions is examined. 4.2.1 The definite and indefinite article in reference A number of uses of the articles have been discussed in the field of linguistics as well as in the field of philosophy; however, the following list will only include those relevant for this analysis. The definite article is usually applied to a certain member of a category, while the indefinite article can be applied to any member of a category. In adult discourse the indefinite article is normally used as an introductory referential device for the first mention while the definite article is used as an anaphoric referential device in subsequent reference when the object of attention has already been specified as a certain member of a category in the first mention. Hence, the use of the definite article indicates that reference is being made to an object which is known to both speaker and addressee. In the example given below, the adult subject first employs an indefinite noun phrase in the first mention of “bird” and “tree” and employs a definite noun phrase in the second mention, while he or she employs again an indefinite noun phrase for the first mention of “dog”: 25 There there’s a bird pecking on a tree. A dog came # and its staring at the bird # up in the tree. (20e05, l.1 + 2) However, the definite article may also be used as an introductory referential device in the first mention if the referent is clear by the context of the utterance, for instance, if a definite noun phrase is used to refer to something visible to both speaker and addressee (Halliday 1976:59). Lyons follows Hawkins in labeling this as “visible situation use” of the definite article (Lyons 1980:84). The type of reference established by the definite article in visible situation use is exophoric. In what follows, the definite article in visible situation use without previous linguistic mention will be designated as exophoric definite article. Conclusively, in the cartoondescription tasks the definite article is either used in first mention as an introductory referential device, that is exophorically, or it is used anaphorically in second reference. It is therefore necessary to examine definite noun phrases which introduce new referents in order to examine the exophoric definite article. The article usage explained above refers to adults, whereas according to Karmiloff-Smith (1979), children under five years do not employ the articles in the same way 26 adults do. She claims that in the language system of young children the definite article occurs exclusively in its exophoric function to draw attention to the object in the focus of attention, while the indefinite article occurs in naming (Karmiloff-Smith 1979:123). Consequently, in the context of the visible situation in the analyzed data a frequent use of the exophoric definitive article as an introductory referential device in the group of three-yearolds could be expected; inversely to a frequent use of the indefinite article as an introductory referential device in the group of six-year-olds having acquired and adjusted to the adult article usage. However, in the group of threeyear olds there is no remarkable difference in the frequency of the definite and indefinite article usage while the six-year-olds make a comparatively frequent use of the exophoric definite article, contrary to the adults who mostly use the indefinite article as an introductory referential device. The results of the analysis of article usage in the group of adult subjects come as no surprise since the indefinite article is the introductory device which is to be expected in first mention in a typical adult discourse, as explicated above. The frequent use of the definite article by the six-year-olds in first mention can be easily explained by the visible situation use. What is surprising 27 is the small number of three-year-olds employing an exophoric, definite article. However, the main prerequisite for article usage is the familiarity with a word to which the article can be applied plus the confidence in the application of the word. Three-year-olds have difficulty labeling the objects, and since they do not have a referential noun to combine with an article they consequently cannot apply an article. Hence, the reticent article usage in the group of the three-year-olds can be easily explained by their reticent use of noun phrases. 4.2.2 Thing or something Of course all of the children have already learnt that thing or something can substitute the correct referential word, as in the examples given below. In (03e19), the child refers to the scene where the woodpecker has pecked off the tree top and refers to the falling tree top as “something else”; in example (06e08) the appropriate term substituted with “thing” is stick: The tree came out a little farther [^ what else happened in there?] Something else broke right here (03e19, l. 7) The monkey took the thing away. (06e08, l. 25) 28 However, even the three-year-olds have already learnt that thing or something is only used for inanimate objects. In the cartoon descriptions, they use thing or something mostly in the third sequence for the falling fruits or the bear’s wooden stick. Still, children as well as adults may use thing or something whenever they cannot recognize whether this is an inanimate or animate object as in the following examples: Something came down on him. It was a monkey [^ and what did the monkey do?] he went rrrraahh. (03e04, l. 23 + 24) The bear goes back to the banana tree and hits it # with the stick but there is something red on top a monkey ok. (20e03, l. 22) In example (03e04), the three-year-old refers to the monkey with something until he or she recognizes the animal and labels it correctly. The adult in example (20e03) uses exactly the same strategy and applies the word “something” only until he or she recognizes the animal and hence can label it with the correct word. In addition to these usages, the children seem to use thing or something for inanimate objects when they can think of a possibly matching word, but are not sure about the appropriateness of this word: 29 Um # one of those things um fell down and dropped on the floor [^ what was that, do you remember?] a banana. (03e03, l. 17) The um thing fell down [^ the what?] the orange fell down. (06e12, l. 20) In both examples, the children seem to have a vague idea that the object in question is some kind of fruit, but the only label the fruits after an inquiry of the interviewer (although “orange” is an overextension caused by an object recognition error, see section 4.2.6.1). In example (03e04), the child corrects him- or herself without inquiry (still, this child also produces an overextension due to an object recognition error by mistaking the bananas for pinecones): Something fell bumped two heads pinecone. (03e04, l. 28) In some cases, children combine an already acquired word with thing to create a novel referential compound: Um # he's knocking on the banana thing again. (06e12, l. 23) He picked up the tree thing. (03e06, l. 14) Um the bear he took the # the bear's chopping thing the wood away from him. (03e05, l. 24) In example (06e12) the child creates the compound from “banana” + “thing” in reference to banana tree. Example 30 (03e06) functions similar by combining “tree” + “thing” to create a novel word for stick. Child (03e05) also creates a novel word for stick; however, the technique applied is different. The child creates the compound from a verb and forms the compound by combining “chopping” + “thing”. In example (03e18), the child uses a different strategy. In the scene where the monkey falls from the tree, the child simply inserts “I don’t know” in the place of a noun like “thing” or “something”: I don't know got up. (03e18, l. 23) 4.2.3 Circumlocutions Circumlocution, sometimes also called periphrasis, means the paraphrasing of a word with other words, i.e., definitions in dictionaries. Child (03e19) refers to the peel of the banana by means of circumlocutions. He or she first describes the peel as a “part of the outside”, and then paraphrases it with “the outside isn’t part of the thing”: He ate part of the outside # the outside isn't part of the thing you're not suppose to eat. (03e19, l. 20) 31 Circumlocutions rarely occur in the cartoon-descriptions. Due to their still small vocabulary, children lack a number of appropriate referential words as well as the vocabulary necessary to construct circumlocutions. Consequently, children prefer pronominal reference, or reference by the usage of mismatching or overextended nominal expressions when encounter as-yet unlabeled objects or objects they are momentarily incapable of labeling. 4.2.4 Specific level terms Clark (1993) defines 5 levels for plants and animals within lexical hierarchies. Taking bear as an example, Clark’s lexical hierarchy would read as follows: a) b) c) d) e) unique beginner (mammal) life form (animal) generic (bear) specific (grizzly bear) varietal (Canadian grizzly bear) The labels in everyday use usually belong to the generic level; most of the adult subjects use the generic level word bear in the respective cartoon-scenes. Semantically speaking, the term animal is hypernym to bear as well as woodpecker; conversely, bear and woodpecker are hyponym to animal, and on this level, bear and woodpecker are cohyponyms. The labels of the generic level can be assumed to be acquired first since they are the labels children are most exposed to and therefore most familiar with. Indeed, 32 all of the children in the cartoon-description task use the generic level words dog, bear and bird. The specific level term woodpecker occurs less frequent in contrast to the generic level word bird. However, some children have already acquired the specific level term woodpecker, as the examples (03e06, l. 5) and (06e15, l. 1) show: He's a woody # woodpecker [^ and wh?] he [^ tell me] knock knock knock (03e06, l. 5) The woodpecker was # the bird was knocking on the tree (06e15, l. 1) Two other children apply other specific level words to bird, which are co-hyponyms: “Duckie” (03e03, l.1) and “Chicken” (06e16, l. 1). Even though these words are overextensions based on perceptual features these two examples show that children perceive prominent features in objects which require a specific level term and attempt to refer to these features. 4.2.5 Meronomic expressions Meronomy describes a special type of part-whole relation. While the part-whole relation in a synecdoche is hierarchically organized, the components of a meronomic part-whole relation are equated, as in the relation of body part such as arm-hand-finger. In the scene of the cartoon 33 which relates to line 6 in the script, the subjects have to refer to a meronomic relation when the woodpecker pecks off the tree top. Even some of the adult subjects have to pay attention to their choice of words. One of them evades relating to tree top by employing a third person pronoun, “okay # the tree is about to fall. It fell” (20e05, l. 5 + 6); another relates to tree top with “part of it (the tree)” (20e07, l. 6); and yet another does not express the part whole relation at first, but then corrects him- or herself: “He pecked on the tree until the # tree # fell I guess # the top of the tree fell (20e14, l. 6)”. As in the first attempt of subject (20e14) in line six, most of the children simply use the whole to refer to the part and thus use an endophorical “it” referring to tree or simply the word “tree” with reference to tree top. Only two of the children are able to produce a referential expression for tree top which expresses the part-whole relation correctly; they refer to it as “top of the tree” (06e10, l. 6) and (06e14, l. 6). Other children express the part-whole relation in this scene without the usage of a meronomical expression, they refer to tree top as “one part … of the tree” (06e15, l. 6), or “half of the tree” (06e13, l. 6). However, these expressions do not specify the tree top as the part falling off. The usage of expressions relating to single parts of a tree is another means of 34 referring to tree top, as in “some leaves” (03e05, l. 6), “leaves” (06e20, l. 6), or “the branch” (03e04, l. 6). However, leaves and branches can be part of a tree top, but a tree top is not part of a leaf or branch. Hence, the usage of these specific meronomic referential expressions conveys the events shown in the cartoon only insufficiently. Subject (06e28) combines the two techniques illustrated above and describes the tree top as “half of his tree branches” (06e28, l. 6). 4.2.6 Mismatching and overextended nominal expressions Among different phenomena characterizing young children’s referential words, mismatch and overextension are relevant in the analysis of cartoon-descriptions. Children do not acquire the whole range of possible word meanings synchronistically with each new word, but during the process of first language acquisition. As a result, their word use differs from adult word use. In some cases, the gap between adult word use and child’s word use hardly allows an identification of the referent; this phenomenon is called mismatch. In other cases, the child extends the word use in order to apply a familiar word to an as-yet unlabelled concept; this is called overextension. The next paragraphs will illustrate mismatches and overextensions in 35 the cartoon-description task and discuss possible reasons for this phenomenon. 4.2.6.1 Overextended nominal expressions According to Barrett, the initial referents of the overextended referential word can share perceptual or functional features with the overextended referent (Barrett 1995). “Duckie” (03e03, l. 1) and “Chicken” (06e16, l. 1), two overextended words used with reference to woodpecker, are based on the visual features the rough sketch of a woodpecker in the cartoon shares with these two members of the category bird. “Hammer” (03e18, l. 1), another overextension with reference to woodpecker, is based on a functional feature, assuming that the child views the function or rather, the action of the woodpecker, as hammering. In fact, some other children overextend the verb hammer in reference to pecking, as in the examples given below: Um # it um # hammered it [^ it hammered, good girl] (03e01, l. 5) He's hammering [^ who is?] a bird. (03e02, l. 1) Um # he was hammering [^ it was hammering?] yea. (03e22, l. 1) As Barret (1995) explains, there are a number of reasons for children to overextend referential words. The 36 most simple and obvious reason for a child to stretch the use of a familiar word is that he or she has not yet acquired a more appropriate word. Child (03e22) stretches the use of the word skin to skin of a banana because it has not acquired the word peel: Um # um # um # he ate the banana with the skin on (03e22, l. 17) Three further reasons explicated by Barrett are relevant for this analysis: object recognition errors, incorrect retrieval from memory, and mispronunciation. In the case of an object recognition error, the child mistakes one object for another and therefore applies an incorrect referential word. In the scene related to line 17 of the cartoon script, a banana falls down, but is not recognized by the child and incorrectly referred to as “leaf”: A leaf fell down and he bumped his head and went down (03e04, l. 17) However, due to the poor quality of the cartoon, object recognition errors are relatively frequent in the cartoondescriptions and even occur in the adults’ descriptions, as the following example illustrates. These lines refer to a 37 scene in which the bear picks up a stick, which the adult erroneously labels as the “shadow” of the bear: The bear walks away but stops to pick up his shadow. Then walks to a # tree # and hits the tree with his shadow. (20e01, l. 15 + 16) In the cartoon, there are three scenes involving a fruit falling from a tree. These scenes evoke a number of overextensions. However, one of the repeatedly overextended referents is pine or pinecone for banana: Something fell bumped two heads pinecone. [^ ok] They threw # he threw # the stick and then they ate some they ate # the pinecone. (03e04, l. 28 +29) A um um # um a pine # what just fell down like a tree. (03e05, l. 27) Bangdid there heads [^ what did?] the pinecone. (03e19, l. 27) The pinecone fell. (03e23, l. 27) Another example for an object recognition error is the usage of “tent” (03e17, l.10) for cave. The peaked form of the stylized drawing of the cartoon-cave indeed bears a strong resemblance to a tent; and thus the child might use the term “tent” although it might be familiar with the word cave. However, this assumption cannot be confirmed; since child (03e17) does not use the word cave in his or her 38 description, it cannot be unerringly stated that he or she has already acquired this word. A more definite example is provided by child (03e17), when he or she refers to the woodpecker’s eyes as “sunglasses”: He put sunglasses on he he he um he # um he put his sunglasses on. (03e17, l. 4) The woodpecker’s eyes in the cartoon are depicted huge and uniformly black and hence bear more resemblance to a set of huge sunglasses than eyes. Yet another child has trouble recognizing the monkey: He's chopping um another tree to get that man down. It was a dead man. It was a monkey [^ what did the monkey do?] he went rrrrraahh . (06e08, l. 22 – 24) In this case, the object recognition error is caused by the combination of perceptual features and the event, that is, the falling. The shape of the monkey resembles that of a human, and the passive falling evokes the idea of lifelessness; thus, the child mistakes the falling monkey for a body. Incorrect retrieval from memory assumes that the children already have acquired the correct word, but confuse the words and accidentally apply an incorrect term. In example (06e09), the child initially attempts to use a 39 wrong word, banana, and then corrects him- or herself to apple: The bear ate the bana # I mean not the banana # the apple (06e09, l. 21) Incorrect retrieval from memory in combination with mispronunciation might explain the usage of “cage” for cave by two children in (03e06) and (03e07): He went into his cage. (03e06, l. 10) Bear went in his cage. (03e07, l. 10) Since cave as well as cage denote a place where bears live, and because the terms also resemble each other phonologically, the children might confuse both terms and retrieve the incorrect word for cave or mispronounce cave as “cage”. 4.2.6.2 Mismatching nominal expressions In the occurrence of an overextension, the initial referent and the overextended referent share certain features. However, in the occurrence of a mismatch, the referential word used by the child has nothing in common with the initial referent. 40 Clark describes mismatch as the child’s attempt “to pronounce some word having assigned some meaning to it, but the adults around neither recognize the word being attempted, nor the meaning assigned to it” (Clark 1993:36) This quote highlights the advantages of a cartoondescription task: because the child describes objects, actions and events the researcher watches simultaneously with the child, the adult is able to relate the child’s utterance to the respective objects, actions and events of the cartoon. Otherwise it might impossible to make sense of the examples illustrated below, in which the children not only label the referent with a single word, but by means of a circumlocution: The # the # bear um # um # got in the fishes ear [^ got in what?] the fishes ear. (03e03, l. 10) He walked inside of a hand. (06e27, l. 10) With these circumlocutions the children obviously attempt to describe the object depicted on the screen, a cave. However, the children not only lack an appropriate referential word, but they also lack the mental meaning of cave including the idea of cave as home of bears. Some other children who also lack an appropriate referential term for cave relate to the scene by overextending words which denote place were people or animals live, but since 41 the children’s referential circumlocutions in the descriptions (03e03) and (06e27) present such an absolute mismatch, it is obvious that the have not yet encountered the concept of cave. In contrast to mismatches where the child does not stretch the word use beyond its ordinary range, but provides as word that does not belong within this range, other mismatches are also caused by mispronunciation and object recognition errors. In the case of a mismatched pronunciation, the child comes up with non-existing word, such as “blananas” (03e06, l.22) or “blanana” (03e06, l. 25). As in the case of overextension, the prime reason for mismatch is an object recognition error as illustrated by a child who refers to woodpecker with “trees eyes” (03e04, l. 1) in the first scene. This child seems to mistake the woodpecker clinging to the tree as a representation of the “trees eyes” (03e04, l. 1) and thus labels it incorrectly. Other children have difficulty recognizing the bananas in the scene represented in line 28, but while the some children overextend words, others provide a clear mismatch: They both had fire in their hands [^ they both had what?] they both had fire in their hands. (3e23, l. 28) A beehive fell down. (06e16, l. 28) 42 Beehive fell down and they're eating it. (6e26, l. 29) 4.3 Referential words for actions and events Some of the phenomena occurring in reference to nouns or nominal expressions also occur in reference to actions and events. An example of a circumlocution in place of a verb is the attempt of child (03e19) to refer to the scene where the tree top is breaking off: The tree came out a little farther [^ what else happened in there?] something else broke right here (03e19, l. 7) As already mentioned, circumlocutions are generally rare in the cartoon-description task, and so are circumlocutions substituting verbs. Overextension as a linguistic phenomenon occurs more frequently in referential words substituting nouns. However, in the analysis of referential words for actions an additional phenomenon has to be considered: the coinage of novel verbs. Children start to coin verbs at around age two. They do not coin novel verb forms by adding suffixes until the age of five and even later (Clark 1993), but prefer to 43 construct novel verbs by zero derivation. Zero derivation is a word formation process that changes the lexical category of a word, but does not change its phonological shape. When children employ zero derivation to coin verbs from nouns, they take a noun for the agent performing the action and use this word as a verb, as in “Axing a tree (03e23, l. 5)”. “Axing” is created from the noun axe, the tool which is used to fell a tree. The child refers to the scene corresponding to line 5 of the cartoon’s script in which the bird is pecking the tree again. There are two reasons for the preference of zero derivation: First, young children have not yet acquired the meaning carried by different kinds of suffixes; and second, zero derivation is the most common process of word formation in English; hence it is also the word formation process young children are most often exposed to and most familiar with. However, the coinage of novel verbs from a noun occurs comparatively seldom in the cartoon-description task compared to Clark’s findings that “the majority of verbs were coined from nouns” in her observation of Damon (Clark 1993:201). The different ways of relating to as-yet unlabeled actions and events children use in the cartoon-description task are explained in the following paragraphs. 44 4.3.1 Overextended words for actions and events While none of children have difficulty in finding the appropriate verbs to refer to flying or going (although the tense forms are confused frequently), finding words for pecking and barking proves to be a rather challenging task. In the first line of the cartoon, the children have to refer to the woodpecker pecking the tree. While seven in the group of six-year-olds employ the correct verb “pecking”, only one of the three-year-olds is able to do so. However, most of the other children overextend verbs which denote an action that involves the notion of hitting and the according sound: “pound on” in description (03e01, l. 1), “hammering” in the descriptions (03e02, l. 1) and (03e22, l. 1), “chopping” (03e23, l. 1), “knock” with different tense markers in the descriptions (03e03, l. 1 ), (03e06, l. 1) and (03e07, l. 1), and finally “knock on”, again with different tense markers, in the descriptions (03e18, l. 1) and (03e21, l. 1). One child overextends the word “chirping” (03e19, l. 1) to pecking, probably because he or she has learned that chirping is a word that frequently occurs in relation to birds. 45 4.3.2 Onomatopoeic imitation and coinage of novel verbs from onomatopoeic words Some children use extralinguistic gestures to refer to actions as they do to refer to nouns as described in section 4.1.1. When referring to objects with an extralinguistic gesture, the children point; when referring to actions with extralinguistic gesture, children imitate the action or part of the action, as illustrated in the examples below: He # he hammered like this [^ he hammered?] the tree. (03e01, l. 17) He hammered like this [^ showing how to hammer on the screen? he hammered?] on the tree. (03e01, l. 20) The bird was fly away like this. (03e02, l. 8) These extralinguistic gestures indicate that the children would like to use more specific verbs to denote the actions in more detail and thus convey their observations in a more detailed manner; however, since they still lack the appropriate words, they fall back on extralinguistic gestures allowed by the given speech situation. Lacking of an appropriate word, children not only imitate the actions with gestures, they also imitate sounds. This phenomenon is called onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeia employs a word that imitates or suggests the 46 object it is describing, such as “bang”, or animal noises such as “ruff-ruff”. It is also related to child-directed speech (CDS), sometimes also referred to as Baby talk or Motherese. CDS is a non-standard form of speech used by adults, usually the caretakers, in talking to young children. It is characterized by a cooing speech pattern and a number of simplified adult words, such as din-din for dinner or “nana” for banana (03e17, l. 1). Those simplified words within the CDS vocabulary are sometimes onomatopoeic, i.e., “choo choo” for train, imitating the sound of a locomotive. Within the group of the three-year-olds, onomatopoeia plays an important role. Some of the young children simply employ a familiar verb such as “went” or “say” combined with an onomatopoeic word to describe an action or event: The thing went on his head and it went boing. (03e01, l. 29) When # when # when # the # the trees eyes was moving and then they were stopped and went ruff ruff [^ what went ruff ruff ?] the dog . (03e04, l.3) He # he says ruff ruff ruff at hh that [^ pointing to the bird]. (03e01, l. 3) He's saying ruff ruff ruff [^ who is?] a dog. (03e02, l. 3) The # he said rrrraaahhh [^ you know what? monkey] the monkey said rrrraaahhh . (03e01, l. 25) Um # the bear said rrrraaahh [^ did anything else happen?] um # the bird fly away then it's gone . (03e02, l. 12) 47 He's a woody # woodpecker [^ and wh?] he [^ tell me] knock knock knock. (03e06, l. 5) Um he # ruff ruff ruff [^ he barked, good girl]. (03e06, l. 3) In addition to this mere imitation of sounds, the threeyear-olds coin novel verbs with the usage of onomatopoeic words. They construct the new verbs by adding a tense marker to the onomatopoeic word. In the examples given below, it is boing + past tense marker [–ed]: A apple fell and it boinged [^ it boinged,ok]. (03e01, l. 21) He # he # he # he # um # um # he # he bb # the thing um # boinged on his head and then it went on the ground. (03e01, l. 24) Another child uses the onomatopoeic word bang + a past tense, although the child pronounces the past tense marker [-ed] defectively as [-did]: He bangdid the tree. (03e19, l. 26) Bangdid there heads [^ what did?] the pinecone. (03e19, l. 27) The same principle works in combining the onomatopoeic with the past tense was and the progressive form marker [-ing] to create a past progressive: “He was banging the tree” 48 (03e19, l. 18). Onomatopoeic words derived from animal noises also serve to coin a novel verb, as in “He ruffed” (03e17, l. 3) or “he's ruffing” (03e02, l. 2). According to Clark’s findings, Damon coined a few novel verbs from exclamations such as “pow”, although only until the age of three (Clark 1993: 201). Verb coinage involving an onomatopoeic word as well as onomatopoeic imitaton occurs in the cartoon-description task only in the group of three-year-olds. Onomatopoeic imitation as in example (03e02, l. 3) can be attributed to Child Directed Speech (CDS). “He’s saying ruff ruff” is a CDS-expression for barking which the children adopted from adult CDS. Sixyear-olds usually reject the use of CDS because they perceive it as Baby talk, a concept six-year-olds do not want to be associated with. Consequently, onomatopoeic verb coinage or onomatopoeic imitation does not occur in the six-year-olds’ cartoon-descriptions. 4.3.3 Intransitivity, transitivity and causation Verbs can be subdivided in different classes and according to different aspects. Relevant to this analysis is the notion of intransitivity and transitivity. Intransitive verbs have a subject but no object, as in “The monkey # gg growled” (06e09, l. 24). Transitive verbs are verbs that require both a subject and an object, often an agent and a 49 patient, as illustrated with “chase” and “eat” in the examples below: A tree and a bird were chasing the dog. (06e08, l. 9) He ate the apple. (06e08, l. 21) Transitive verbs can be part of a causative expression, which consists of an agent causing or forcing a patient to perform an action (or to be in a certain state): “The dogs are # was ready to get on the tree and scare the bird away” (06e08, l. 2). According to Clark, children start to discover the notion of transitivity and intransitivity in verbs as well as connections between intransitive and transitive causative pairs like open (the door opened/ He opened the door) at the approximate age of two years (1993). At the same time children start to become aware of transitivity and intransitivity they begin to use “make”, “get” and “let” to express causation. However, in the cartoondescription task, the children use “make”, “get” or “let” only on few occasions, and if they do, they rather employ those verbs as substitute for a more specific verb, as the examples below show: There gonna get crumbled up by the bear. (03e19, l. 11) 50 The doggie's trying to get him right [^ what?] the dog is trying to get em [^ yes that doggies is trying to get him]. (03e21, l. 2) Um # he didn't get a blanana cause he didn't knock it. (03e06, l. 25) He can't get a banana. (03e21, l. 25) In all four of these examples, the use of “get” resembles the adult informal use: “get” as substitute for receive in (03e06, l. 25) and (03e21, l. 25), as a substitute for catch in (03e21, l. 2), and as a substitute for become or be in (03e19, l. 11). However, in both groups the children rarely use causative expressions, although such an expression would be appropriate in the scene in which the woodpecker chops off the tree top (Script of Cartoon, l.6). It appears that some of the children do not relate the action of pecking to the falling of the tree top, as the following example indicates: He's still axing a tree [^ and did anything else happen?] no [^ did you see the top of the tree fall off] yes. (03e23 l. 6) In a few other cases the children simply state that the “tree fell down” (03e18, 03e210, 06e090, 06e25). Some other children describe the events as one sequence, but do not explicitly express the causal relation: 51 He was knocking on the tree and then it fell off. (03e03 l. 6) The bird was pecking on the tree and half of the tree came off. (06e13 l. 6) The dd # um # the bird knocked on the tree then the a then one part fell off of the tree. (06e15 l. 6) Child (06e14) does not employ a transitive verb, but uses a circumlocution with a because-construction (“cause”), which still indicates that he or she comprehends the relational sequence of the events: “The top of the tree fell off cause he pecked it too much” (06e14, l. 6). Only few children clearly and correctly note and express the relation of the woodpecker pecking the tree and the tree top falling to the ground: Knocked some leaves down [^ Knocked some leaves down?]. (03e05, l. 6) The bird pecked the um # top of the tree down. (06e10, l. 6) He knocked the tree over. (06e11, l. 6) It knocked down the tree. (06e16, l. 6) He pecked it off. (06e27, l. 6) The employment of verb particles or prepositions like up or down in children’s reference to motion in space starts at an early age (Clark 1993), and is still employed when lacking an appropriate verb. In order to express the causality and the motion, all the children coin novel verbs 52 as phrasal verbs, that is, verbs plus prepositions: “Knock down” in example (03e05, l. 6) and (06e16, l. 6), “knock over” (06e11. l. 6) “peck down” (06e10, l. 6), and “peck off” in (06e27, l. 6). In the beginning, children confuse transitive and intransitive verb forms, as Clark illustrates: “She threw the ball/The ball threw down” (1993: 201). There are two similar examples in the data from the cartoon-description task: The # the tree knock # knocked down (03e02, l. 6) The tree knocked down. (03e07, l. 6; 03e19, l. 6) According to Clark, the examples above would translate as “he (the woodpecker) knocked the tree down”, which then corresponds to the children giving the descriptions (03e05, l. 6) and (06e16, l. 6), who also refer to the action with “knock down”. However, since this confusion of transitivity and intransitivity in the scene corresponding to line 6 occurs only in the group of three-year-olds, the data from the cartoon-description task confirms the findings Clark observed in a natural environment. 53 5 Story structure, story schemata, scripts and frames The notion of frames goes back to Bartlett (1923), who introduced the term schema for nonverbal information on knowledge of the world stored in the human mind. Bartlett disliked the notion of invariability inherent in the term schema and instead hypothesized that structures of knowledge were continuously subjected to change as the human mind is continuously subjected to new experiences. While schema can be described as a pre-existing knowledge structure, the term script has been introduced to relate to the pre-existing knowledge structure referring to a sequence of events. The notion of schemata as pre-existing knowledge structures has been specified for the study of story comprehension and story production. Mandler (1983) points out that stories have common underlying structures that can be described in the form of story structures. These story structures are mentally represented by story schemata which are potentially subconscious. In other words, stories have inherent structures, and the pre-existing knowledge of story structures stored in the human mind is referred to as story schemata. They are acquired through encounter with different kinds of stories (Mandler 1983). Story structures 54 and story schemata have been central to the analysis of story comprehensions and story production because it has been hypothesized that story schemata provide the preexisting knowledge structures essential to interpretation and hence comprehension of the events of a story. Deborah Tannen further elaborated the connection of pre-existing knowledge structures to an individual’s story comprehension and story production. For this purpose, she introduced the term frame as “structures of expectations” Tannen (1993: 17), and theorizes that “as soon as we measure a new perception against what we know of the world from prior experience, we are dealing with expectations” (1993: 17). In other words, pre-existing knowledge structures form the basic assessment of each new situation encountered. While theories of story schemata distinguish different types of knowledge, Tannen differentiates different “levels of frames” (Tannen 1993: 22). Tannen adopted the basic ideas of story schemata and modified them to create a vocabulary suitable to describe her data. 5.1 The classification of cartoondescriptions In Tannen’s data the narration or story consists of a retelling of a film. The data analyzed in this thesis also 55 consist of an oral account of events in a film, but the events are reported while the subjects are watching. How is this oral account to be classified? Tannen refers to the samples in her data as “a special kind of story telling”. In the CHILDES corpus, the cartoondescriptions are listed under the category narrative. However, Labov states that a narrative contains temporally ordered sentences relating to a teller’s past experience (Labov 1972). By this definition, the term narrative is limited to the verbal accounts of experiences that are a) personal and b) past. In the light of Labov’s theory a number of problems arise from the attempt to apply the term narrative to the data from the MacBates 2 corpus. First, the children are not narrating a personal experience. Second, they are not retelling the cartoon after watching it, which could be considered as past experience in the broadest sense. While Labov was interested in the structure of oral narratives of personal past experiences, this thesis studies how frames influence children’s verbalization of the visual depiction of a pre-determined sequence of events; hence the structure of the cartoondescription plays only a minor role. Consequently, the problem whether they are to be labeled as narratives or stories can be neglected. It is rather the cartoon’s structure which pre-determines the structure of the 56 cartoon-descriptions that deserves some further elaboration. Provided that story schemata, or in Tannen’s words, the expectations about events, influences the subjects’ and especially the children’s comprehension of the story, the pre-existing knowledge about story structures in children needs to be considered. In fact, the pre-determined structure of the cartoon correlates with one of the six basic types of structures that can be found in verbal accounts of personal past experiences by children between the ages of two and five (Applebee 1978). The cartoon’s structure corresponds to Applebee’s sequence in which “…the events are linked together on the basis of an attribute shared with a common center or core of the story. The center can take a number of different forms: … a scene or situation … such as the events of a day” (Applebee 1978: 38) The center of the cartoon is represented by the events that are connected by the protagonists which link the single sequences or episodes of the cartoon together. Consequently, the cartoon’s pre-determined structure corresponds to the sequence suggested by Applebee as one of the structures a child is likely to use when asked to tell as story. Hence, the structure of the cartoon appears natural to the children and is suitable to trigger a story telling frame. 57 6 The influence of frames on referential words Tannen brought forward linguistic evidence as proof of her theory. In this thesis, the existence of frames as structures of expectation is premised and the object of investigation is the influence of pre-existing knowledge structures on semantic and grammatical features of language as well as structural elements in oral accounts. 6.1 The “frame-relations” of objects and actions and their influence on referential words The following section discusses the influence of rather general pre-existing knowledge structures. As pointed out before, some of the objects shown in the cartoon are not always recognizable at first glance, i.e., the woodpecker at the very beginning of the cartoon. It has no typical features of a woodpecker; still, the adults have no difficulty recognizing the object as a bird and labeling it with the specific level term woodpecker. The reason why the woodpecker is recognized as such so easily by the adult subjects is due to their frame knowledge concerning birds which can be summarized as a bird that pecks trees is a 58 special kind of bird named woodpecker. It can be assumed that it is the action of pecking which calls up the woodpecker frame and the corresponding bird name. In both groups of children, only few subjects are able to apply the correct specific level term, but most of them are familiar with the generic level term bird. However, in the very first scene that shows the woodpecker, the three-year-olds have great difficulty in recognizing and labeling the object; most of them evade the usage of a noun by referring to the woodpecker with an exophoric third person pronoun “he”, as illustrated below in the first line of example (03e22). Interestingly, child (03e22) applies the generic level term bird for the first time in his or her description in line 7 which corresponds to the cartoon scene where the woodpecker starts to fly: 1. 2. 3. 4. Um # he was hammering [^ it was hammering?] yea. Hammering and the dog runned out . He barked. I don't know [^ did you see that one? wh?] I don't know [^ you can tell me] I just don't know. 5. He was hammering. 6. The tree almost fell. 7. A bird [^ and wh?] the dog ran away and the bird flew with him. (03e22) The same phenomenon can be observed in example (03e17) where the child has great difficulty in comprehending and verbalizing the events. The child avoids the usage of any nominal referential expression for woodpecker. Then again 59 in line 7, the child recognizes and labels the object as “birdie”: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Nana tree [^ but what happened in there ?] he he said knock knock . Doggie was there [^ doggie was there, good girl] . He ruffed [^ he ruffed] . He put sunglasses on he he he um he # um he put his sunglasses on . He did that [^ what was that called?] a nana tree [^ but what was he doing to it ?] xxx. 6. The tree fell off . 7. A birdie [^ what did the birdie do?] he flew away with the doggie. (03e17) In the following example (03e18) the child refers to woodpecker with the mismatching word “hammer”. The mismatch might be caused by the bird’s action; it appears that the child has not yet learned that the hammering action of birds is usually labeled as pecking. It could also be assumed that the child has learned that the action of hammers is referred to as hammering and hence label the bird as hammer. However, this child also recognizes the object and labels it correctly as soon as it starts flying in line 7: 1. [^ 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Um # a hammer [^ a hammer] knocked on the tree knocked on the tree, very good]. Dog came [^ a dog came]. Um # um barked [^ what barked?] the dog. He looked. Ah # he knocked again [^ he knocked again]. The tree fell down. Flew away [^ who flew away] the bird [^ did anything else happen?] catch the dog . (03e18) 60 In the example (03e04) the child mistakes the woodpecker for the “tree’s eyes” and refers to it with “tree’s eyes” persistently through the lines 1, 3, 4 and 6. Again, the flying in line 7 brings about the change from “tree’s eyes” to “birdie”: 1. The # the # trees eyes was moving . 2. When # when a doggie was looking up he stopped . 3. When # when # when # the # the trees eyes was moving and then they were stopped and went ruff ruff [^ what went ruff ruff ?] the dog. 4. The eyes moved and they turn around to triangles . 5. They turned around and um # the # the eyes went # like that. 6. The eyes were moving and the branch fell off. 7. The birdie flew away [^ and did anything else happen?] the dog run away . (03e04) Examples (03e06) and (03e23) further support the theory that certain actions call upon certain frames and hence support the recognition and labeling of objects. In example (03e06) the child labels the bird correctly with the specific level term. The researcher asks “and why” and the child gives the reason “he … knock knock knock”, which might be interpreted as “because he’s pecking on a tree and a bird pecking on a tree is a woodpecker”: He's a woody # woodpecker [^ and wh?] he [^ tell me] knock knock knock . (03e06, l. 5) 61 7 The analysis of frames in the cartoon description task and their influence on semantic and grammatical features In what follows, the notion of frames outlined by Tannen in “What’s in a frame” (Tannen 1993) will be applied to the cartoon-description task. In the analysis of semantic and grammatical features, the experiment frame presents the outer frame. On a sublevel, the interaction frame and the expectation evoked by the functional presumption are the predominant factors influencing the subjects’ oral account. In the study conducted with the children the researcher interacts with the children by encouraging them to continue with their account whenever they digress; in the accounts of the adults the mere awareness of the researcher’s presence is reflected in the use of features typical for interaction in discourse. Additional frames are represented by the cartoon frame, the subjects’ general assumptions about cartoons and by the story telling frame, the expectations of how stories should be told. 7.1 Verbal realizations of expectations Prior to a detailed analysis of the different frames and their influence on language use, four phenomena related to 62 expectations will be outlined: negative statements, evaluation, inference and interpretation. All of the four phenomena can occur within different levels of frames. 7.1.1 Negative statements According to Tannen, a negative statement is “one of the clearest and most frequent indications that an expectation is not being met” (Tannen 1993: 23). It may refer to expectations the subjects have about themselves, i.g., the children assume that they should be able to name the objects shown in the cartoon, and finding themselves unable to do so, they utter the negative statement “I don’t know”. In fact, “I don’t know” with reference to an as-yet unlabelled object or an object they cannot recognize is the most frequent negative statement in the cartoon-description of the three-year-olds. In the following examples, the negative statement “I don’t know” indicates the children’s assumption that he or she should be able to label the object shown in the cartoon. Child (03e22) cannot refer to woodpecker in the first scene, and substitutes the nominal reference with exophoric “he” (03e22, l. 1). Then, in the fourth line, he or she finally admits to not being able to name the object: 63 I don't know [^ did you see that one? wh?] I don't know [^ you can tell me] I just don't know. (03e22, l. 4) As stated by Tannen, the word “just” is often used to “underplay a statement to block criticism on the basis that it is not more, therefore revealing the assumption that others might expect more” (Tannen 1993: 25). In the example above, the “just” functions on the one side to add emphasis to the “I don’t know”, similar to the effect that could be achieved by the word really in an utterance such as I really don’t know. The child probably adds the stress because the researcher repeatedly asked the child whether he or she could label the object. The use of “just” instead of really indicates that the child feels distress about not meeting the researcher’s expectations. Another example of an unmet expectation is the negative statement of (03e01): “he didn't peel it off” (03e01, l. 19). While the utterance “I don’t know” expresses the subject’s unmet expectation about him- or herself and thus is triggered by the experiment frame, the above example expresses an unmet expectation about the events shown in the cartoon in comparison to the child’s pre-existing knowledge structure about food. He or she compares the bear’s eating of the banana without peeling to his or her previous experiences with bananas and finds that 64 they are usually peeled before eating. Hence, this negative statement is triggered by general world knowledge. 7.1.2 Evaluative elements Labov explains that, “Evaluation of a narrative event is information on the consequences of the event for human needs and desires”. He further states that a “narrator evaluates events by comparing them with events in an alternative reality that was not in fact realized.” (http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/sfs.html) In the example (03e23) below, the event in an alternative reality that was not in fact realized is the previous peeling of the banana. The cartoon’s protagonist eating the banana “with the peel on” is compared to this and evaluated by the child (03e23) with the comment “yuk”: What did he eat with the peel on # yuk. (03e23, l. 20) However, in the cartoon-descriptions evaluative elements are rather seldom. 7.1.3 Inference and interpretation Tannen describes inferences as “statements which could not be known simply from observation of the film, as for example when the subjects report characters’ thoughts, 65 feelings, and motivations” (Tannen 1993: 47), as the below example illustrates. The child assumes that there is a reason for the bird to turn its head and therefore infers that “he thought … something was behind him”: He thought # he thought the dd # something was behind him so he turned his head the other way. (06e28, l. 4) Child (03e21) also tries to assign a motive to the bird’s turning of its head and infers that it is a reaction to the dog’s barking because “he didn’t like that”: He barked and it made a # and he and he didn't like that. (03e21, l. 3) In example (03e24), the child figures that the dog has a reason to come running and infers the motive as “to see what was going on”: A dog came along to see what was going on. (03e24, l. 2) Interestingly, the scene where the bear chases the bird and dog out of the cave, causes the most inference in both groups of children. All inference relate to emotion fear, or rather, the absence of fear as in example (03e23). In this example, the child infers that “they must be brave” 66 and reveals thereby that he or she would feel fear in such a situation: They must be brave [^ they must be brave?] yea [^ who must?] the bird and the dog . (03e23, l. 11) In the following examples, all children use a form of the word “scare” and thereby infer that the protagonists are scared by the bear: He's scared [^ and what else happened?] they runned away. (03e07, l. 12) He scared out of poop of them. (03e17, l. 12) He scared # the dog [^ who was?] it was the bear. (03e22, l. 12) See the # the bear scared both of em away. (06e28, l. 12) They ran out because the um bird flew away and the dog run away because the bear # the bear scared em . (06e15, l. 12) Remarkably, only one adult subject refers to this scene with a form of “scare” (20e11, l. 12); all other adults describe the scene in emotional neutral words. It can be followed that the children infer the notion of being scared because they expect themselves to be scared in a similar situation. In contrast to inference, interpretation does not refer to the projection of inner states to the protagonists 67 of the cartoon, but tries to find an explanation for their actions. The following two examples illustrate interpretative language using the example of “friend”. Both adult subjects interpret the action of shaking hands as a gesture of friendship: Monkey # uh monkey throws the rock away both animals shake hands become friends and # both eat the bananas. (20e06 l. 29) Instead I guess they decide to become friends they shook hands and just both started eating the bananas. (20e07, l. 29) Two other adult subjects interpret the handshake as an act of congratulation: The two animals # shake as if they have worked together to # reach a common goal and they both # eat the bananas. (20e08, l. 29) The monkey throws the stick away # um the monkey and the bear shake hands # I guess for they're achievement and begin to eat the bananas. (20e10, l. 29) This kind of interpretation of the hand shaking scene cannot be found in the children’s cartoon-descriptions. Presumably, the children have not yet acquired respective frames that relate this action to the concept of friendship or congratulation. 68 7.2 Experiment frame The experiment frame influences the subjects’ oral performance in a number of ways. As already pointed out, the researcher and the subjects participating in this experiment are watching the cartoon conjointly, which leads to the exophoric use of the definite article as explained in section 4.2.1. Further, the experiment frame affects the subjects’ oral performance insofar as it brings about two other influencing factors: interaction of researcher and subjects and the subjects’ functional presumption. 7.2.1 Interactional frame The major difference between the researcher-child interaction and the researcher-adult interaction is that the researcher does not need to “guide” the adult subjects through their accounts. Hence, the interaction is not as frequent as the researcher-child interaction and is rather one-sided. It comes more or less implicitly from the subjects, as the following examples illustrate: 4. 5. 7. 7. 11. okay # the bird turned around to look at the dog. okay # the tree is about to fall. okay the bird chase started chasing the dog. (20e05) okay # the dog runs off and then the bird flies away. okay # the same dog and bird appear and the dog runs into the cave And then the bird follows. (20e01) 69 The “okay” seems to be a signal to the researcher meaning something similar to “Now I’m going to give you the next description”. The interaction between researcher and child is mostly initiated by the researcher. In some cases, the children need the researcher’s assistance to continue with their account, as in example (06e27): They all went out [^ and what else happened?] the bear went after em. (06e27, l. 12) In other cases, the researcher assists by providing the lacking vocabulary, as “cave” in (03e24): The bear just # got into that [^ what is that?] its a # I don't know what that is [^ cave] yea cave. (03e24, l. 10) Still, the children do not simply respond to the researcher’s questions but address him or her themselves with the call “See # see” as in (06e28): See # see he's chopping on the tree. (06e28, l. 1) 7.2.2 Functional presumption Bamberg lists four types of knowledge involved in story comprehension. One of them is functional knowledge, “the 70 purpose for telling a story” (Bamberg 1986: 7). In this thesis it will be argued that the purpose for telling a story is not only involved in story comprehension, but also in the production of oral accounts. Although the subjects participating in the cartoon description task do not know the purpose of their oral accounts, they subconsciously presuppose a purpose for their accounts. This presupposition of purpose for giving their account will be labeled as functional presumption. The functional presumption calls up certain frames with respective semantic and grammatical features. 7.2.2.1 Adults’ functional presumption All subjects are instructed to tell the researcher what they see. In fact, a number of adults start their descriptions with a preface indicating that they relate to something they see or saw: xxx just saw a bird pecking on a tree. (20e01, l. 1) I just saw a bird pecking on the tree. (20e09, l. 1) I see a bird pecking on a tree. (20e13, l. 1) I see a woodpecker pecking a tree. (20e08, l. 1) 71 Subject (20e08) returns to the “tell you what I see pattern” again in line 11 of the transcript: Next you see # the dog run into the cave # and the woodpecker # fly after him. (20e08, l. 11) Most of the adult subjects seem to assume that a mere description of the events is the single purpose of their oral accounts. Apart from the frequently occurring preface “I see” or “I saw”, the adults also use different tenses than the children. Due to the simultaneous watching and describing, the tenses are rather confused in all cartoondescriptions; the subjects switch from present to past without an analyzable pattern. However, the tense most frequently occurring in the adults’ descriptions is the simple present. They use it the same way in which it is used, e.g., in sports reports. 7.2.2.2 Children’s functional presumption While most of the adults comprehend the task as a mere description task, the children seem to have rather different expectations about this task. The group of threeyear-olds seems to assume that they are supposed to fulfill a mixture of labeling and a story telling task; the group of six-year-olds performs a mixture of labeling, story telling and a description task. 72 7.2.2.2.1 A labeling task Karmiloff-Smith pointed out that in her experiment the children under 4 years old “decoded the whole task as a naming task” (Karmiloff-Smith 1979: 121). She understood that the large number of indefinite articles occurring in her data resulted from the young children’s use of the indefinite article in naming. As explicated in section 4.2.1, the indefinite article occurs more frequently in the cartoon-descriptions of the three-year-olds than in those of the six-year-olds. Assuming that the indefinite article is in fact an indicator of the children’s expectation of the task as a naming task, this expectation directly affects the article usage. However, there is more evidence for the assumption that the children understand the task as a naming task. As illustrated in section 4.1.1, only one child uses extralinguistic pointing gestures for reference. This is astonishing considering that especially the three-year-olds have great difficulty in labeling a number of objects. Still, they rather draw on different naming techniques illustrated in sections 5 and 6 than to simply rely on a pointing gesture. Further evidence supporting the theory of the threeyear olds’ understanding of the task is provided by the false starts and negative statements. As explained in 73 section 7.1.1, the negative statement “I don’t know” indicates that they expect themselves to be able to name the objects. In example (03e21), the negative statement is preceded by a false start in which the child is obviously aiming at a noun phrase: Knocking down the banana with a # I don't know what that is. (03e21, l. 21) In example (03e24), the child first refers to cave with a demonstrative pronoun, then tries to answer the researcher’s question, “it’s a”, hesitates “#”, and finally admits “I don’t know what that is”. The bear just # got into that [^ what is that?] its a # I don't know what that is [^ cave] yea cave. (03e24, l. 10) The next example shows a child trying to refer to an action it cannot comprehend and therefore cannot label. The negative statement is again preceded by false starts “The”, hesitation “#”, and another false start “they were”: The # they were I don't know I don't know. (03e24, l.27) In the following examples, the children try to verbalize what they see in the cartoon directly after their negative 74 statement, which shows that they are trying to meet what they believe to be the researcher’s expectations. Child (03e23) has difficulty in referring to the meronomical relation of tree and tree top, and consequently has difficulty in labeling the tree top, but after the researcher’s question the child attempts to refer to tree top by a synecdoche pars pro toto: I don't know [^ tell me what you saw] I don't know the tree walked away. (03e23, l. 8) It is again the researcher’s question that elicits a prompt labeling after an initial negative statement in example (03e18): I don't know [^ what is that?] a banana [^ and what did it do?] it fell down. (03e18, l. 16) In example (06e16), the child starts with a negative statement, but names the object as soon as he or she believes to have recognized the object. Unfortunately, the exigency results in a mismatch caused by an object recognition error; the child mistakes the moving tree top for a rock: I don't know what that was it was a rock (06e16, l. 8) 75 This illustrates how different knowledge ranges and knowledge structures influence the subjects’ functional presumption, and also illustrates how functional presumption again influences word choice as well tense use and article usage. 7.2.2.2.2 A story telling task The theory that the children also understand the purpose of the experiment as a story telling task is supported by their use of formulations typical for stories as well as their tense use. Child (03e24) even applies a formal story closing phrase; although the formal closing does not occur at the actual end of the cartoon, it still indicates that the child perceives his or her account related to story telling: The dog # and the bird # lived happily ever after well the bird was pecking and the dog was seeing what was going on. (03e24, l. 5) Child (03e21) introduces a sentence with “What happened is”. This preface signals that the child is in the story telling frame; further, he or she accounts the events in the past tense typically used in stories: What happened is he went into the cave [^ he went into the cave]. (03e21, l. 10) 76 As pointed out before, the simultaneity of watching and describing causes a confusion in the use of tenses, and adult subjects as well as the children switch from past to present without an evident pattern. In spite of the tense switching, the present tense is predominant in most of the adult’s descriptions, while the past tense is predominant in most of the children’s descriptions. As the adult’s predominantly use the present tense because they assume that they are supposed to fulfill a description task, the children use the past tense because they assume that they are supposed to fulfill a story telling task. 7.2.2.3 The cartoon-frame Tannen further classifies a film-frame and a film-viewer frame. In the film-viewer frame, expectations the subjects have about themselves as film- viewers, or in this case rather cartoon-viewers, come into play. Subject (20e07) includes a number of utterances in his or her description that rather refer to his or her assumptions about the events of the cartoon than the actual events. In the example below, subject (20e07) marks his or her assumptions with “I guess” and thereby indicates that the following utterances not only depict the events shown in the cartoon but also reflect his or her inferences about the cartoon: 77 Then one of the bunches of bananas fell down hit the bear on the head # hit then it hit the monkey on the head and landed in between them so I guess now they're going to fight over it or something. Instead I guess they decide to become friends they shook hands and just both started eating the bananas. (20e07, l. 28 + 29) The subjects participating in this experiment – children as well as adults - hardly ever fall into the cartoon-viewer frame. While it can be assumed that the young children simply do not realize themselves as cartoon-viewers, the six-year olds as well as the adults do not relate to their expectations about the cartoon presumably for the same reason why they hardly ever evaluate the events shown in the cartoon: it is simply not included in the subjects’ functional presumption. Far more influential is the film frame, or in this case, the cartoon frame. The cartoon frame subsumes any kind of pre-existing knowledge about cartoons including the fact that events, objects and actions depicted are not necessarily realistic. This explains some rather idiosyncratic descriptions in the group of the children, as the examples below demonstrate. Child (03e04) mistakes the woodpecker for “the trees eyes”, because in illustrations of children’s books or cartoons in general it is not that unusual for a tree to have eyes: 78 The # the # trees eyes was moving. (03e04, l. 4) Another child mistakes the hammering sound produced by the woodpecker as some sort of tree language: Nana tree [^ but what happened in there ?] he he said knock knock . (03e17, l. 1) The same child finds it possible that birds wear sunglasses: He put sunglasses on he he he um he # um he put his sunglasses on. (03e17, l. 4) These examples show that children classify factual unrealistic events as part of a cartoon and hence classify them as realistic due to their pre-existing knowledge of cartoons. 79 8 Conclusion In this thesis, the notion of frames outlined by Deborah Tannen has been applied to oral accounts collected in a cartoon-description task. Tannen states that “structures of expectation make interpretation possible, but in the process they also reflect back on perception of the world to justify that interpretation” (Tannen 1993: 21). Although the basic conditions of this study were different than those in Tannen’s study, frames could be found and their influence on vocabulary, story comprehension and story production could be illustrated. It has been shown that pre-existing knowledge assists in the recognition of objects and in the comprehension of situations. The role of outer conditions, in the analyzed data presented by the experiment frame, and the assumed purpose for giving an oral account, presented by the functional presumption, are factors that influence oral accounts on different levels. The functional presumption affects structural elements of an account; it leads to a number of negative statements and few evaluative elements this study. A different level of frame which is related to general knowledge about the world assist in the interpretation of gestures, as exemplified in the scene where the protagonists are shaking hands. The 80 children merely report the action, presumably because they have not acquired a frame that helps them to classify and label this action, while this gesture calls up a “friendship frame” in some of the adults. The analysis of children’s and adults inference and interpretation demonstrates that frames are acquired just as language. Without a respective frame situations may not be fully comprehended and hence not verbalized. Consequently, children have to acquire frames to express themselves. However, frames are also culture-specific. As the world is becoming ever smaller with advanced communication technologies, research into frame knowledge will be further developed and play an important role in intercultural communication. I I. Appendix: Transcriptions I.I. Transcriptions of the three-year-olds 03e01 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. The # he pound on the tree . The doggie um # um # come on and watch that . He # he says ruff ruff ruff at hh that [^ pointing to the bird] . It turned around . Um # it um # hammered [^ it hammered, good girl] . It breaked [^ ok] the tree breaked . That was a bird um # the tree broked the # the doggie runned away and the bird flyed . 8. Something went by. 9. There # there they are again # there was a tree and a doggie and bird. 10. they runned . 11. He went under there [^ ok, pointing to the cave] . 12. The dog went # the bird and the dog went in there with the bear [^ with the bear, pointing to the cave] . 13. It said rrrrraahh the bear rrrraahhh [^ and?] they runned . 14. The bear and the doggie and the bird # and this one [^ the bear] the bear said rrrraahh they say rrrrrahhh [^ and?] they went in this tree . 15. The tree moved . 16. Maybe he's # he picked up a um # the um # the stick . 17. He # he hammered like this [^ he hammered ?] the tree . 18. A banana fell down on his head and it # went on the ground [^ and it went on the ground, good girl] . 19. He he ate it with # a peel he didn't peel it off [^ he ate the peel too?] . 20. He hammered like this [^ showing how to hammer on the screen? he hammered?] on the tree . 21. A apple fell and it boinged [^ it boinged,ok] . 22. He # ate it . 23. He hammered it # he's hammer # he hammered on the tree . 24. He # he # he # he # um # um # he # he bb # the thing um # boinged on his head and then it went on the ground [^ it went on the ground the thing did] . 25. The # he said rrrraaahhh [^ you know what ? monkey] the monkey said rrrraaahhh . 26. He taked the thing off the tree # off # his hand [^ pointing to the bear] he taked # he taked it away from the bear the stick . 27. [^ did you see what happened ?] It taked # the thing taked off the tree . 28. He hammered like this . 29. The thing went on his head and it went boing . 30. They ated and and # [^ what do you think those are?] um bananas . @End Words 464 II 03e02 1. He's hammering [^ who is?] a bird . 2. It was a dog [^ and wh?] he's ruffing [^ he is?] . 3. He's saying ruff ruff ruff [^ who is ?] a dog . 4. He turned around . 5. He he # [^ he did what?] he hammered it . 6. The # the tree knock # knocked down . 7. The bird fly away [^ and?] and the dog runned . 8. [^ did you see that? wh?] The bird was fly away like this . 9. The bird # get the tree then he's eating it [^ he was?] . 10. The bear went on the # [^ do you remember what that was?] it was a bear . 11. The bird flyed down and the dog run in it . 12. Um # the bear said rrrraaahh [^ did anything else happen?] um # the bird fly away then it's gone . 13. The bear # um # um # um # the # um # um # the bird and the # dog went in the tree . 14. The bird and the dog fly away [^ they did? are you sure?] . 15. He picked up the stick then he # then the # he's gonna go that way then he's gonna get back in his home . 16. [^ what did he do?] He hammered a tree . 17. The banana fell down . 18. He eat the banana in his mouth . 19. He knocked # he kn he hammered the tree . 20. The apple fell down . 21. He eat the apple in his mouth . 22. He knocked . 23. A # it was a monkies [^ it was what?] monkies they fell off then they cryed . 24. A lion [^ a what?] a lion [^ it was a lion?] . 25. He take the stick away from the bear . 26. He opened his mouth [^ he opened his mouth ?] . 27. He knocked all the way down [^ knocked all the way down ,ok] . 28. That fell down right on the floor # on the grass . 29. They eat the bananas then they shake hands . @End Words: 376 III 03e24 1. Ah # the bird was pecking a tree [^ the bird was pecking the tree] . 2. A dog came along to see what was going on . 3. Well the bird the dog barked at him . 4. The bird went down and the dog went up . 5. The dog # and the bird # lived happily ever after well the bird was pecking and the dog was seeing what was going on . 6. The tree fell off . 7. The # well # ah the # well the tree went up and the # the the dog just ran away and bird flew after him . 8. The bear ran after the bird [^ the what did?] the bear . 9. A walkin tree [^ what else happened?] I don't know lets start the film back . 10. The bear just # got into that [^ what is that?] its a # I don't know what that is [^ cave] yea cave . 11. The dog and the bird went into a cave . 12. They # they runned # over and over again [^ they runned over and over again ?] yea [^ what else happened?] well the cave was # was # empty . 13. Yea that's a talkin # that's a walkin tree . 14. There were # the bear took onto a tr took a treebranch . 15. Well # the bear # tryed to hit a tree . 16. A banana # came down [^ a banana came down] . 17. Ah # the bear got a banana . 18. He hit the tree # again . 19. Well # the bear got an apple . 20. The bear just ate it [^ he ate it, ok] . 21. Well # the bear hit the tree with a monkey in it . 22. The monkey fell . 23. He roared [^ he roared?] he said aaaaahhhhh . 24. He took the tree branch . 25. He roared [^ he roared?] he said aaaaahhhhh . 26. Well # the monkey hit the tree . 27. The # they were I don't know I don't know . 28. Well # they shaked hands # and they ate pineapple . @End 397 words IV 03e03 1. Um # duckie knocking [^ the what?] the duckie knocking on the tree. 2. The # the doggie runned when the when the duckie was knocking . 3. Hh he was he he was um # he was barking . 4. [^ did you see what happened?] Um # [^ tell me everything you saw] he was looking up in the sky [^ say it a little bit louder for me] the # the # doggie was # was looking up in the sky . 5. He knocked on the tree . 6. He was knocking on the tree and then it fell off . 7. The both runned away . 8. Um # part of the tree um runned away . 9. All of them runned the other way [^ they what?] all of them runned the other way . 10. The # the # bear um # um # got in the fishes ear [^ got in what?] the fishes ear . 11. Um # the birdie flyed and # and then he um # he got in his ear so did the dd doggie . 12. They all runned out and the bear growled [^ he growled?] yea . 13. They were walking in the swimming pool and then they two well got in the tree and the bear didn't . 14. The tree went away . 15. Um # the bear # walked and then he found a stick and he picked it up. 16. Um # hh he picked up and a stick and then he knocked it on the tree and it wasn't make noise . 17. Um # one of those things um fell down and dropped on the floor [^ what was that, do you remember ?] a banana [^ it was a banana,ok] . 18. Um # he throw the stick um # away [^ and then what else?] um it went away . 19. Um he walked and then he found a stick # ah the stick again and then # it make noise when he um bumped it # . 20. Um # that goes down on the floor [^ do you know what that was? # apple] . 21. He ate it [^ he ate what?] the apple . 22. Um # he picked up the stick and then knocked it on the tree . 23. He fell off [^ who did?] the duck . 24. [^ what was that?] That was the bear growling at the monkey [^ oh, the bear growled at the monkey ,ok] . 25. Um # the monkey taked away the stick from the bear . 26. Um # he dropped it down . 27. Now # now the ma # I mean the # I mean the monkey had the stick and he knocked it on the tree . 28. The bb # the whole um bananas fell down . 29. Um # um # the mon # key throwed the stick down and then it went away and then they share the apple and then they shaked hands . @End 520 words V 03e04 1. The # the # trees eyes was moving . 2. When # when a doggie was looking up he stopped . 3. When # when # when # the # the trees eyes was moving and then they were stopped and went ruff ruff [^ what went ruff ruff ?] the dog . 4. The eyes moved and they turn around to triangles . 5. They turned around and um # the # the eyes went # like that . 6. The eyes were moving and the branch fell off . 7. The birdie flew away [^ and did anything else happen?] the dog run away . 8. The leaf went away . 9. The doggie and the bird and a branch came back and they rr run up the hill . 10. The bear crawled in his cave . 11. The dog and the bird # got in the cave . 12. That was a bear # when it got out the bear it went rrrraahhh . 13. The # the bird and the doggie was running and they hide in the tree and there and they and the bear xxx the face . 14. They were they # got away . 15. The bear crawled away and he # lift up the wood . 16. He was hitting the tree . 17. A leaf fell down and he bumped his head and went down . 18. He ate # the leaf [^ ok] that was a banana . 19. He was hitting the tree and nothing came down . 20. A apple fell down on his head and then it # he looked down . 22. [^ ok] The tree came close to him and he walked away so he # he hammered that tree and nothing came down . 23. Something came down on him . 24. It was a monkey [^ and what did the monkey do?] he went rrrraahh . 25. He took the stick away . 26. They both looked up on a tree . 27. He was hitting the tree and nothing came down . 28. Something fell bumped two heads pinecone . 29. [^ ok] They threw # he threw # the stick and then they ate some they ate # the pinecone . @End 384 words VI 03e05 1. A bird [^ a bird what?] knocking the tree down . 2. A bb a dog came by an an and looked at the bird [^ and looked at the bird, very good] . 3. The dd dd dog bb barked at the bird . 4. He turned around . 5. He knocked on it he knocked the tree (a)gain [^ uh huh, again] . 6. Knocked some leaves down [^ Knocked some leaves down?] . 7. They all flew they # the bird flew away and the dog ran away . 8. The # um the # um the # the leaves rolled away . 9. They went that way [^ what went that way?] the dog and the tree and the bird . 10. The bear went in the cave . 11. xxx um the bear um the dog and the bird went in the cave . 12. The dog and the bird and the bear was trying to get the bird and the dog # was trying to get away . 13. The # tree went away . 14. The # the bear picked up some wood . 15. He he he's try to knock the tree down . 16. He's he # the a bird came # flying right down . 17. And the bear um ate the bird up . 18. He's chopping that tree down . 19. Um a apple came falling right down [^ it came falling right down, very good] . 20. He ate the apple up . 21. The monkey was on the tree and he was try he was trying to chop it down . 22. The um the # the monkey fell down . 23. He's hh hh he said rrrrraaahh he jumped . 24. Um the bear he took the # the bear's chopping thing the wood away from him . 25. He he he looked up in the tree # and the bear did too . 26. He he was chopping the tree down so so the so the bear wouldn't get up so the so the so the so the tree will fall down on the bear . 27. A um um # um a pine # what just fell down like a tree . 28. [^ ok now tell me] Um the the bear and the monkey were shake shakibg hands [^ and what else?] they they picked up some things to eat . @End 411 words VII 03e06 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. He's knocking . A doggie runned to his tree . Um he # ruff ruff ruff [^ he barked, good girl] . [^ tell me] He turned about [^ he turned about?] . He's a woody # woodpecker [^ and wh?] he [^ tell me] knock knock knock . 6. The tree falled the grass down his coat . 7. He flewed away [^ and what else?] the doggie runned and he wanted his mother . 8. It grass grass runned [^ the grass ran , good girl] . 9. They # they runned back now [^ they ran back, good girl] . 10. He went into his cage . 11. They went # went in # in his cage . 12. He was gonna # he was aaaaa [^ he was what?] he was screaming [^ ok, and what else happened?] the doggie went and the birdie flyed away . 13. Um # the tree went away [^ uh huh] and the bear was wasn't gonna get those little baby bear [^ the bears not gonna get them?] . 14. He picked up the tree thing . 15. He knocked # knocked the tree . 16. He # the banana falled for him # so he xxx # so he would get it . 17. He # he eatin it # with the peel off . 18. He knock knock knock . 19. It falled [^ talk here, wh?] it was gonna fall off so he eat it . 20. He eated it already . 21. He knocked it so he gets another orange . 22. Lot of bl # blananas falled . 23. Um the monkey said rrrrrraahh he said rrrrah . 24. The monkey took it away . 25. Um # he didn't get a blanana cause he didn't knock it . 26. It didn't fall down yet . 27. xxx [^ what?] xxx fall down [^ oh half of them fell down] . 28. They eat two of them . @End 340 words VIII 03e07 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. He knocked # the wall . A dog was watching the bird knock the tree . The bird didn't look at the dog [^ what did the dog do?] he barked . Look backwards he didn't see any nothing . He nn # do that again [^ he did what again?] knocked the tree . The tree knocked down . They flyed away and the dog # and the dog run . The tree # come with the bird [^ he come with the bird] . They # they went that way [^ who went that way?] the bird and the dog and the # tree . 10. Bear went in his cage . 11. The dog went in the cage and the bird . 12. He's scared [^ and what else happened?] they runned away . 13. The tree went away all by itself . 14. The bear pick up # a stick . 15. Um ah it's trying knock down the tree . 16. A banana # banana [^ what did it do ?] it fall down on the grass . 17. Bears like to eat banana . 18. He's trying knock down a apple [^ ok, he's trying to knock down an apple] . 19. He knocked down a apple . 20. He eat it all gone [^ he eat it all gone, ok] . 21. He's trying knock down a banana again . 22. The monkies jumped down . 23. He scared the bear . 24. He take the stick away from him . 25. They looked up the tree . 26. They kn # the tt # what's that it its # the monkey's trying knock down a banana for the bear [^ he's trying to knock down a banana for the bear] . 27. The bear # a banana got full of bananas . 28. They both eat bananas together . @End 327 words IX 03e17 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Nana tree [^ but what happened in there ?] he he said knock knock . Doggie was there [^ doggie was there, good girl] . He ruffed [^ he ruffed] . He put sunglasses on he he he um he # um he put his sunglasses on . He did that [^ what was that called?] a nana tree [^ but what was he doing to it ?] xxx. 6. The tree fell off . 7. A birdie [^ what did the birdie do?] he flew away with the doggie . 8. The tr # part of the tree fell # the part # part of the tree rolled and rolled and rolled . 9. Um the tree and the # and the doggie and the birdie flyed and then and then and then the birdie and then the birdie was gonna go home . 10. He went in his other tent . 11. Birdie and the doggie went in in the tent . 12. He scared out of poop of them . 13. It moved away from him . 14. He picked it up . 15. The # a banana tree [^ and wh?] he knocked on the door . 16. What did he do? 17. He ate it he ate it . 18. Now is he getting another one ? 19. he knocked on the door and said I want nana . 20. apple it bum # it went on his head . 21. He ate it . 22. He knocked on the door . 23. A dog he went down here . 24. He said rah rah [^ who did?] the doggie . 25. Put his hand down . 26. Um # he knocked on the door . 27. He knocked on the door # he kn he knocked on the tree . 28. He got bananas out . 29. They ate em . @End 323 words X 03e18 1. Um # a hammer [^ a hammer] knocked on the tree [^ knocked on the tree,very good] . 2. Dog came [^ a dog came] . 3. Um # um barked [^ what barked?] the dog . 4. He looked . 5. Ah # he knocked again [^ he knocked again] . 6. The tree fell down . 7. Flew away [^ who flew away] the bird [^ did anything else happen?] catch the dog . 8. Um # one of the trees fell off . 9. Um # ran with the tree [^ what ran with the tree?] um the bird . 10. Um # the bear went in his cave . 11. The dog [^ and what else?] went in the cave . 12. The bear run with them [^ the bear run with them] . 13. The tree ran away . 14. Picked up a branch . 15. Knocked on a tree . 16. I don't know [^ what is that?] a banana [^ and what did it do?] it fell down . 17. Ate the banana all up . 18. Um # knocked on a on another tree . 19. The banana came dd # another banana came down . 20. Ate it . 21. Um # knocked on another tree . 22. xxx the tree [^ what did? do you know what that is? monkey] . 23. I don't know got up . 24. Took it away from the bear . 25. 0 [^ what did they do?] . 26. The monkey knocked it [^ the monkey knocked it] . 27. Knocked on both heads [^ it knocked on both of their heads?] . 28. Ate all the bananas . @End 287 words XI 03e19 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. He was chirping [^ he was chirping , very good] . The dog running . He barked . The tree came down lower . Ah # chirping [^ again huh?] . The tree knocked down . The tree came out a little farther [^ what else happened in there?] something else broke right here [^ ok, but didn't the dog and the bird go away?] yea . 8. A rock came by . 9. The rock's following the guys . 10. The bears xxx by # eating the kite [^ now wh?] he went threw the kite and ate the kite # ate the kite too . 11. There gonna get crumbled up by the bear . 12. The bear was chasing them . 13. The bear didn't chase them again the tree moved . 14. Found the back . 15. Banging a tree . 16. I don't know what that was [^ banana] fell right on his head . 17. He was eating a bb # a banana on your papers . 18. He was banging the tree . 19. Apple came down on his head . 20. He ate part of the outside # the outside isn't part of the thing you're not suppose to eat . 21. He bangdid the tree . 22. He was hiding behind the tree [^ what was?] the owl . 23. The monkey got scared . 24. He took his bananan away cause # cause bears aren't really suppose to eat bananas . 25. I don't know . 26. He bangdid the tree . 27. Bangdid there heads [^ what did?] the pinecone . 28. The pinecone got away um they ate some bananas . @End 292 words XII 03e21 1. He was knocking on the tree and its a woodpecker . 2. The doggie's trying to get him right [^ what?] the dog is trying to get em [^ yes that doggies is trying to get him] . 3. He barked and it made a # and he and he didn't like that . 4. His head turned around . 5. He turned his head into a bird head . 6. A tree fell down . 7. He flew away and the doggie run away . 8. It runned the tree # part of the tree run away . 9. The dd # the tree ran after the doggie and the um bird . 10. What happened is he went into the cave [^ he went into the cave] . 11. The bird and the um # the dog went in the cave . 12. He chase the bear chased em after . 13. The dog crawled away with it . 14. The bear picked up a # he walked over and picked up a log . 15. He's gonna knock down the tree to get some bananas . 16. He knocked a banana down . 17. He ate it . 18. He's knocking down some apples . 19. Ah # I not right it wasn't a apple it was a coconut [^ and what did it do?] fell down . 20. He ate the shell . 21. Knocking down the banana with a # I don't know what that is . 22. It flew down [^ monkey] monkey . 23. He went rrrraahhh [^ who did?] the monkey . 24. The monkey took away the log . 25. He can't get a banana . 26. No banana falled . 27. A banana fall bananas fall down . 28. They shaked hands and ate # two bananas . @End 311 words XIII 03e22 1. 2. 3. 4. Um # he was hammering [^ it was hammering?] yea . Hammering and the dog runned out . He barked . I don't know [^ did you see that one ? wh?] I don't know [^ you can tell me] I just don't know . 5. He was hammering . 6. The tree almost fell . 7. A bird [^ and wh?] the dog ran away and the bird flew with him . 8. A rock [^ and what did it do?] um # it it rolled over there to there. 9. Um # um they flew and um the dog ran and and he flew and then the rock um followed . 10. A bear walking across # into the cave . 11. Um they went # went into the cave . 12. He scared # the dog [^ who was?] it was the bear . 13. It moved away . 14. Picking up um a st # a branch . 15. He bumped the tree and it almost fell . 16. A banana fell . 17. Um # um # um # he ate the banana with the skin on . 18. He's banging on the tree and it almost fell . 19. Another banana fell on him . 20. He ate it again . 21. It almost fell [^ what did?] the tree . 22. One of the monkies fell . 23. He screamed at the bear . 24. The monkey took it away from the bear . 25. Um # I didn't see . 26. Um # he was banging and some of the monkies fell off a little # sorta . 27. I I don't know what that is [^ bananas] bananas The banana fell off. 28. Ateing bananas [^ is that all] no they have to eat these bananas [^ oh, they have to eat those bananas] . @End 320 words XIV 03e23 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. He chopping a tree [^ he's chopping a tree] . A dog came . He's barked [^ he barked, ok] . Now he turn his face [^ what was that?] xxx he turn his face . Axing a tree . He's still axing a tree [^ and did anything else happen?] no [^ did you see the top of the tree fall off] yes . 7. xxx . 8. I don't know [^ tell me what you saw] I don't know the tree walked away . 9. The doggie and the bird ran # that way . 10. A bear's walking # into his cave . 11. They must be brave [^ they must be brave?] yea [^ who must?] the bird and the dog . 12. He growled and they got out . 13. Trees mm # the tree moved . 14. He was blocked by a tree . 15. No response recorded for #16. 16. A banana falls [^ a banana fall?] . 17. He ate it with a peel on . 18. He just hit the tree two times . 19. Another banana # fall . 20. What did he eat with the peel on # yuk . 21. He hit it two times . 22. And the monkies jumped down . 23. Those are apes [^ and wh?] I don't know [^ what did they do?] they jumped . 24. He took his stick away . 25. He put it down . 26. He hit it three times . 27. The pinecone fell . 28. They both had fire in their hands [^ they both had what?] they both had fire in their hands . @End 287 words XV I.II. Transcriptions of the six-year-olds 06e08 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. The bird was chopping the tree . The dogs are # was ready to get on the tree and scare the bird away. Um he just stayed there . He didn't know it was a dog . The tree is trimming # like # um different . The tree fell down . The um woodpecker went after the dog . Um I think someone # went after # help em [^ help em?, who did?] I don't know . 9. A tree and a bird were chasing the dog . 10. The bear went um # in in his cave . 11. The um dog went in the bb # bear's cave # so did the um # so did the um # bird . 12. The bear scared em away . 13. Um he took the look at the bush tree but he thought they weren't there . 14. It's moving away [^ what is?] the tree . 15. He's thinking about them [^ who is?] the bear [^ is that all?] ah #. 16. He's chopping the tree like. 17. A banana came down for him . 18. He um ate the banana with the peel on it . 19. [^ wh?] He's chopping another tree again . 20. A apple fell down on his head and he's he um he looked at it . 21. He ate the apple . 22. He's chopping um another tree to get that man down . 23. It was a dead man . 24. It was a monkey [^ what did the monkey do?] he went rrrrraahh . 25. The monkey took the thing away . 26. They both look up on the tree . 27. The um monkey's getting big chops . 28. It fell on both of their heads . 29. They both made friends [^ what else did they do?] they shooked hands and they share um the # the bananas . @End 334 words XVI 06e09 1. He's um # pecking the tree . 2. The dog is looking at the bird . 3. The doggie barked at the bir # bird . 4. He turned his head around . 5. He's pecking the tree again . 6. The tree fell down . 7. The bird flyed away and the dog runned . 8. The tree rolled away . 9. The tree's # um # chasing the bird and the dog . 10. The bear climbed in his cave . 11. The dog and the bird um went in his cave . 12. The bear chased the dog and the birdie . 13. They # they hided in the tree . 14. The tree went away . 15. The bear # um the bear picked up a branch . 16. The bear's um knockin the tree . 17. Banana fell down . 18. The bear ate the banana . 19. The bear's knocking the tree down . 20. Apple fell down . 21. The bear ate the bana # I mean not the banana # the apple . 22. He's knocking the tree down . 23. The monkey fell down . 24. The monkey # gg growled . 25. The monkey # um took the branch away from the bear . 26. Um # [^ did you see that?] no [^ well I'll tell you this time, they both just looked up] . 27. The monkey um patted the tree again [^ the monkey did what?] he knocked the tree down . 28. The bananas fell down . 29. They ate the bananas . @End 269 words XVII 06e10 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. The bird is # pecking . The dog # walk # ran across . The bird was pecking and the dog # was # bb barking . The bird looked the other way . The bird went back to pecking his hole . The bird pecked the um # top of the tree down. The bird flyed after the dog . The tree rolled away . The # the bird was chasing the # dog # and um the tree top was chasing the bird . 10. The bear was walking into his cave . 11. The dog and the bird went on inside the cave . 12. The bear was after the dog and the bird . 13. The # um # the bird and the dog hided in the # christmas tree and the bear # was looking at the christmas tree . 14. A tree moved away from the # bear . 15. The bear picked up a board . 16. The bear um # walked over to a tree and he banged it with a # board. 17. A banana dropped on his head . 18. The bear ate all the banana . 19. The bear walked on and he banged another tree . 20. A apple fell down from the tree . 21. The bear ate the apple . 22. The bear banged # the tree. 23. The monkey fell down out of the tree . 24. The monkey was mad at the bear . 25. The monkey took the board away from the bear . 26. The bear looked up at the tree . 27. The monkey hit the tree . 28. A whole bunch of bananas fell on the bear's head and the monkey's head and fell on the # ground . 29. The um monkey threw the board away and he started to eat the bananas with the bear. @End 328 words XVIII 06e11 1. He # the bird was kn # trying to knock the tree over . 2. The dog is watching him . 3. Barking he barked [^ ok, he barked at #] the bird . 4. He turned around . 5. He's still doing it . 6. He knocked the tree over . 7. They ah # they flew away # the dd # the dog runned and the bird fly. 8. It flew away [^ ok, it?] it flew away . 9. The part of the tree chased # chased the bird and # the dog . 10. The bear's going in the cave . 11. The dog went in the cave # in the bird . 13. He growled [^ and?] they rr # the dog flew [^ the dog flew?] [^ wh?] the dog # runned and the bear runned # and the bird flew . 14. They # they went in the tree [^ and?] the bear didn't . 15. It moved away [^ what did?] the tree . 16. He picked up the log . 17. He's trying to chop it down . 18. The leaf fell down . 19. He ate the leaf . 20. He's chopping the tree down . 21. The orange fell down . 22. He picked up the orange . 23. He's chopping that tree down . 24. The # [^ monkey] monkey fell down . 25. He growled . 26. He took the log away . 27. He looked up . 28. He's trimming the tree down . 29. It fell down . 30. He ate the ban # they both ate the bananas . @End 278 words XIX 06e12 1. Um # the bird was kn um knocking the tree [^ knocking on the tree, very good] . 2. Um the dog came along and he was pecking . 3. Um # the dog was barking to the bird . 4. Um # xxx the bird went like this [^ went like this?] yea [^ did he turn his head?] . 5. Um # hh it the trees about to knock off cause he was pecking on it . 6. Um the # he was um knocking on the tree. 7. They all flew away . 8. Um the tree went over there [^ it went over there?] . 9. Um # all the stuff went over there . 10. The bear went in his house . 11. The bird and the dog went in his house . 12. The bear um screamed at them . 13. Now the bear can't find em . 14. Now the bear um is trying to look for them um # the tree moved over. 15. And the bear saw # um a log [^ uh huh and ?] and um # he was going back home . 16. Um he's trying to get a banana . 17. A banana fell down . 18. He ate it . 19. He was do # he was trying to get a um a orange . 20. The um thing fell down [^ the what?] the orange fell down . 22. He ate it # with the orange peel on . 23. Um # he's knocking on the banana thing again . 24. The um # bear fell down I mean I mean the monkey fell down [^ monkey fell down , ok] . 25. The monkey went rrrraaahh . 26. Um # hh um # the monkey took the thing # the wood . 27. [^ did you see wh?] I didn't see it . 28. Um # now the um # monkey's doing it # pounding it . 29. Um the um # that side of the bananas fell down . 30. Um # they're now um # the monkey shared [^ shared what?] the bananas. @End 363 words XX 06e13 1. The bird was tapping on the tree . 2. The bird was # knocking on the tree # and the dog came # and he # barked . 3. The # the # woodpecker was pecking on the tree # and the dog barked. 4. I forgot # The bird was pecking on the tree and the dog was barking . 5. The bird was pecking on the tree again [^ again] . 6. The bird was pecking on the tree and half of the tree came off . 7. The bird flew away after the dog . 8. The ss # ball ran # out of the film [^ uh huh the ball went out of the film] . 9. The tree was chasing # the # dog # and the # dog was chasing the bird . 10. The bear went into his cave . 11. The # bird went in and the bear # and a the dog went in . 12. The bear was chasing the dog # and the dog was chasing the # bird . 13. The bear was chasing them and then the dog got in the tree and the bird flew up to the top . 14. The # the tree went away . 15. The # bear was gonna # kick something . 16. The bear was knocking on the tree . 17. A banana fell down . 18. He ate the banana . 19. He was knocking on the tree . 20. A # pineapple fell down . 21. He ate the pineapple . 22. He was knocking on the tree . 23. The dog fell down . 24. The monkey woke up . 25. He took # the # tree away from the boy # bear . 26. [^ what did they do?] He climbed up the tree . 27. The monkey hit the tree . 28. The # pineapple # fell down # off of the tree # and hit the monkey's head and hit the bear's head . 29. [^ what were they doing?] Um # they were fighting [^ they were fighting? did they do anything else?] no . @End 366 words XXI 06e14 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Um # he was pecking on the tree . A dog was trying to get up in tree and # get # the bird . The dog rr # the dog # um # barked . The bird turned his head . He # he he turned his head this way and then started pecking again . The top of the tree fell off cause he pecked it too much . The dog and the bird flew away . The the the top of the tree rolled . The the dog and the a # bird and and the bush rr the bush rolled over there and then the # the dog went after it oh and the bird went after it [^ uh huh the bird went too] . 10. The bear went into the cave . 11. The dog and the bb bear I mean the dog and the bird went in it . 12. The bear was # mad and the # the dog and the bird rr ran out . 13. They ran into the tree and the bear couldn't catch em . 14. The tt the tree rr the tree went away . 15. He picked up a piece of wood or something . 16. He he was patting the tree . 17. A banana fell down . 18. He ate it with the skin on . 19. He was patting that tree . 20. The apple fell down from the tree . 21. He ate the apple . 22. He was patting that tree came back to the banana tree . 23. Ah # ah # a whole bunch of # bananas came down . 24. That didn't # that wasn't a banana # that was a monkey [^ and what did the monkey do?] he said rrrrraahh . 25. The monkey tt took his stick # and then # didn't um # the bear was very ss was very mad . 26. They both looked up . 27. Um # he patted the tree . 28. Some bananas fell down . 29. They # they're sharing the bananas . @End 366 words XXII 06e15 1. The woodpecker was # the bird was knocking on the tree. 2. The when the bird was knocking the dog came over and looked at the bird. 3. The bird was knocking on the tree and the um dog began to bark at it. 4. The bird turned around . 5. After it turned around it ww looked back at the tree and started knocking again . 6. The dd # um # the bird knocked on the tree then the a then one part fell off of the tree . 7. After it fell down the dog runned away and the bird flew away . 8. Um a rock rolled over and then the tree went like that . 9. The dog ran and the um bird flew and the other part of the tree went with them . 10. Um the bear was walking on there and then he went back in his cave . 11. The dog ran and he went # and he went in there and the bird missed the turn and he flew back and went in there with the dog . 12. They ran out because the um bird flew away and the dog run away because the bear # the bear scared em . 13. When they were running across those bumps the dog run in there and the bird flew in there and then they peeked out when the bear comed . 14. The dog was still staring when the tree runned away. 15. The bear walked back and he picked up a branch. 16. He # he walked with the branch and then he knocked on that tree two times. 17. Um # he knocked on the tree # one more time and then um # something fell down . 18. The something that fell down um the bear ate it. 19. After he ate that thing he um # walked with his um # stick in his hand and # then he knocked on that tree again . 20. A nut fell down and then he saw it fell down. 21. He dropped his stick and ate the nut . 22. He walked over to the other tree and um # took a stick to knocked on a tree two times . 23. The thing fell down. 24. The monkey um jumped up and ss um # um # oo ah um # did like the bear did when he scared those um # when the when he scared the dog and the bird . 25. He ss # the mon # the monkey stand there for a little bit and then he took his he took the thing away from him . 26. The monkey um # hit um # the bear reached his arms like that. 27. Um # the when the bear put his um arms down the um # the monkey knocked two three times . 28. The monkey knocked it two times and then the um nut fell down and hit the bear's head and the monkies head and then after it did that it fell below the tree . 29. Um # after a while when # the nut fell down um # the monkey threw the stick and um then the monkey shaked the um # the hand with the bear and the bear shook the hand with the monkey and then they both picked a nut and ate it . @End 582 words XXIII 06e16 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. The chicken [^ the chicken what? do you remember what he did?] . Um the doggie came . He barked [^ who barked?] the doggie . I didn't see . He was knocking on the tree then he went back . It knocked down the tree . Now he's going after the dog . I don't know what that was it was a rock [^ and what did the rock do?] roll . 9. Um # the tree went with it and the dog was running and the # um # bird was flying . 10. Now the bear's walking # now he's walking into a # cave . 11. The cat and dog # no the # the dog and bird went in there . 12. They all went out and he said that noise . 13. They went in the bush and the bear stand out there . 14. The tree moved away . 15. The bear picked up his stick . 16. Now he was knocking to try to get those things down from the tree . 17. Now he # now he # um # put it the stick down . 18. He ate a banana . 19. Now he's knocking on another tree to get a banana down . 20. It fell on his head . 21. He ate it . 22. He was knocking on another tree . 23. Something fell on his head . 24. He # he said rah rah . 25. I didn't see Oh he was # he sit down on his arm . 26. He # they both stand ww he just stand up . 27. He's hitting the tree . 28. A beehive fell down . 29. They were eating a banana and they shake hands . @End 309 words XXIV 06e20 1. Um # the bird was pecking on a tree and then he stopped. 2. It stopped [^ did anything else happen?] a dog came. 3. The dog was # barking and then he stopped. 4. He looked that way and then stopped. 5. He # um pecked again and then he stopped. 6. Leaves felled off [^ oh, leaves fell off]. 7. No ones at it # no ones at it. 8. Um # the pile went away. 9. They keep doing that # going back and forth. 10. Bear went into his cave. 11. The dog went in the cave and the bird went in the cave. 12. Ah # the um bear went after the dog. 13. Um he's chasing the dog and the bird # um # they're gg hiding in there [^ they're hiding in there?] . 14. The tree's moving away. 15. The bear picked up a piece of wood. 16. Pineapple tree # and he's cutting down it . 17. Ah # the bear stopped and # one of the leaves fell off . 18. The bear got that leaf and ate it . 19. He he he hit on the tree again . 20. A apple fell on his head . 21. Picked it up and ate it . 22. He was knocking on the tree and then he stopped . 23. [^ monkey] Monkey fell out of the tree . 24. He got up # and made noise . 25. The um # monkey took the away from # the bear . 26. Looked up in the tree . 27. Um the monkey was hitting it on the tree too and then he stopped . 28. One fell on their head . 29. They both ate leaves and they shaked hands . @End 301 words XXV 06e25 1. That bird was um # pecking um the the tree . 2. That that dog was um watching the um bird peck the tree . 3. The dog was um # talking to the bird . 4. The um bird turned around . 5. The bird # turned back around and started pecking again . 6. The tree fell down . 7. The dog runned away and the bird flyed away . 8. The tree limbs runned away . 9. Um # they're gg # they're chasing the dog a little bit . 10. Bear went into his cave . 11. The dog and the bird went # in the cave . 12. They came out of the cave [^ and what else?] chased em out of his home . 13. They hided in the bushes from the bear . 14. The tree runned away with the dog and the bird . 15. The bear took up a um # a log . 16. The bear was hitting the tree . 17. Banana bounce on his head . 18. He ate the banana . 19. He was # hitting the tree again . 20. A apple bounced on his head . 21. He ate the apple . 22. He hit the tree again . 23. The whole bunch of bananas fell down on his head and then bounce and the other xxx too . 24. It was a um # [^ monkey] a monkey he thought it was a # a whole bunch of bananas . 25. He took the log from the bear . 26. 0 [^ let's go on and do the next one] . 27. He was # the that monkey was hitting the tree . 28. Um # the bananas bounce on the um bear's head and then it bounce on the monkey's head and it bounce in the middle . 29. They're eating bananas . @End 322 words XXVI 06e26 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Bird pecking a tree . Dog watching the bird peck the tree . The bird pecking a tree with a dog barking at it . The bird moved his head . The dog watching the bird peck the tree and the bird moved . The dog watched the bird peck the tree and # um # the tree fell down. The tree # the tree grew up cause the bird was pecking at it when the dog ran away the bird went after him . 8. Um # the part of the tree moved away . 9. The dog went after the dog that was watching the bird peck the tree and the pp the tree that pecked is going after them . 10. A bear went in a cave . 11. The bear # went in the cave and the then the dog and then the bird . 12. Um # the # the bear went after the bird when the # bird's going after # the um # dog . 13. The bird # and the dog went inside and the bear can't find them . 14. The # the tree went away with the dog and # the bird and the bear is still sitting there not knowing where it went . 15. The bear crawled back and picked up a log . 16. He's hitting a tree # with the log . 17. A nut fell down on his head . 18. He's # he ate it . 19. He's # he's hitting a apple tree with another log . 20. Ah aa # he was hitting the apple tree with a log and the apple fell on head and he's looking at it . 21. He ate the apple . 22. He's hitting a tree with the # the same log . 23. Um # [^ monkey] monkey came down . 24. The monkey growled at the bear . 25. Hh # the monkey took it away from the bear . 26. [^ did you see what happened?] The monkey put the log down and they both looked up . 27. He # the monkey's hitting the tree wh when they looked up . 28. Um # a beehive # fell down on their head . 29. Beehive fell down and they're eating it . @End 398 words XXVII 06e27 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. The bird pecking a tree . The dog tryed to get the bird . He started to bark at the bird . He turned around . He started to peck the tree again . He pecked it off . He flew away and the dog ran away . The branches went away too . They went the other way [^ who did?] the # the branches and the bird and the dog . 10. He walked inside of a hand . 11. The dog ran in the bird went in . 12. They all went out [^ and what else happened?] the bear went after em. 13. They flew into the tree and the bear can't find em now . 14. The tree # the tree went away with them . 15. The bear got a piece of wood . 16. He's trying to knock the tree down . 17. The bb # something hit em on the head [^ do you know what it was?] what [^ banana] . 18. He ate it . 19. He's trying to knock that tree down and a and a apple gonna fall on him . 20. The apple fell on him . 21. He ate it . 22. A bird's sitting in the tree that # somethings gonna fall on him again . 23. The monkey fell . 24. He growled at it . 25. Um # the bear tryed to do something to him . 26. The bear standed up . 27. The monkey got that branch and tryed to hit the tree . 28. Something fell down . 29. They shaked hands and started being friends and # and they both ate it . @End 294 words XXVIII 06e28 1. See # see he's chopping on the tree . 2. While he was chopping on the tree a dog came along and looked at him. 3. While he was chopping on the tree the dog saw him and barked # at him . 4. He thought # he thought the dd # something was behind him so he turned his head the other way . 5. So then he turned his head back the other way and started chopping because he thought it was gone . 6. The tree fell # half of his tree branches fell down . 7. What # what happened is the bird flew away and the dog ran away . 8. Um the tree branch walked away # that's what happened . 9. The dog and the bird came back and the tree branch came back and they went over the hill . 10. The bear was up on the hill and he went into his cave . 11. The dog and the bear # the dog and then the bird went into the bear's cave . 12. See the # the bear scared both of em away . 13. They both hid in # they both jumped into the tree and hid # from the bear . 14. The tree # the tree walked away . 15. A bear the bear started walking back to his cave and before he got there he found something . 16. He's starting hit # he started hitting it on the tree . 17. A banana fell on his nose . 18. He ate the banana . 19. He's hitting a apple tree . 20. A apple fell on his head . 21. Um # the aa # he ate the apple . 22. He's hitting a tt # he's hitting the same tree [^ ok] # that he did before and a monkey # is on it . 23. The monkey fell on his head . 24. The monk # the monkey growled . 25. Then the monkey grabbed his stick # the bear's stick . 26. I missed that one . 27. Now the monkey's hitting the tree with his stick and noth and nothing fell . 28. The bananas # a banana fell on this side and it hit his head and then it bounced back over onto his head and then it fell on the ground . 29. He started hitting and then he threw his stick away and then they both shaked hands and they're eating the bananas . @End 428 words XXIX I.III. Transcriptions of the twenty-year-olds 20e01 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. @End xxx just saw a bird pecking on a tree. okay # Bird continues pecking on a tree And the dog appears in the background and then sits and looks at the bird. The dog then barks at the bird. Um the bird turns his head and looks # away from the tree. okay # the bird continues to peck at the tree and it dit pecks # into the tree and it's xxx # there's just a little bit sitting on top. And the top of the tree falls off and the dog kind of # looks back at it. okay # the dog runs off and then the bird flies away. Then the top of the tree runs away. The dog runs across the screen seemingly chased by the bird which is in turn # followed by the top of the tree. The bear appears and # walks # into a cave. okay # the same dog and bird appear and the dog runs into the cave And then the bird follows. The bird and the dog run out of the cave chased by the bear # which growls at them. The dog and the bird # run and fly into the tree # and look at the bear And the bear stops and looks at them. The tree slides off the edge of the screen. The bear walks away but stops to pick up his shadow. Then walks to a # tree # and hits the tree with his shadow. A banana subsequently falls to the ground. He drops his shadow which disappears and then eats the banana whole. Walks to an apple tree and begins hitting it with # what I will take to be his shadow. An apple falls down hits him on the head and then # falls to the ground. The bear eats the apple. He picks up his shadow again walks to a banana tree # upon which is sitting some red creature # and he hits the tree . The monkey falls out of the tree and lands on the bear's head and then falls to the ground. The monkey becomes irrate # and screams at the bear. The monkey takes # um whatever the bear was carrying around from him. They both look up # at the banana tree anticipating that the bananas will fall down. They both look at each other and then the monkey starts hitting the tree. A clump of bananas floats softly to the ground # ah # first hitting the bear and the monkey. Monkey throws the stick away which disappears And then both the bear and the monkey commense to eat bananas. XXX 20e02 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. @End A woodpecker is pecking in a tree. A dog came running # curious about the noise # the woodpecker was making. Now the dog is barking at the woodpecker. Wookpecker look # turns aroun # looks around. He pecks a big hole # in the tree. The top of the tree fell down # beside the dog. And the dog # runs away # woodpecker # goes in the same direction. And the top of the tree # goes out of the film # out of the # picture. And the dog is running # woodpecker still flying after it and the # tree going after the woodpecker. And there's a bear that crawls into his # hole # cave. The dog and the woodpecker fly in # dog runs in there and the And the bear chases them both out. And both the dog and the woodpecker hide in the tree. Then the tree moves out of the picture # with the dog and the woodpecker in it. Then the bear picks up a piece of wood # like a club. Then he hits the tree # with it. A banana fell on his head # then to the ground. Picks up the banana and eats it. Then he walked to another tree with the apples in it and hit it with the stick. Apple falls down on his head then on the ground again. Then he picks up the apple and eats it. Then he walks back to the banana tree again and hits it with the ss stick again. There was a monkey on the top of the tree it fell down on his head and then on the ground. Then the monkey starts # yelling towards the bear. Picks the # stick from the bear # takes it from him. And then the bear is pointing towards the bananas. Then the monkey is hitting with # tree with the stick. Then the bunch of bananas fall on the bear's head # then on the monkey's head # and then on the ground. Then the monkey and the bear shake each other hands # and then they eat the bananas. XXXI 20e03 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. @End There was a bird in a tree # pecking the tree. okay a dog approaches and looks up at the bird. The dog barks at the bird. The bird # looks around and probably sees the dog. Ah # the bird pecks the tree # and # pecks some of it away. The # top of the tree falls off. Um # the dog runs away and the bird flies away. And the top of the tree rolls away. The tree and the dog and the top of the tree cross the picture # the other way . okay there's a bear going into a cave. The dog and the bird go into the cave. The bear chases them out. The bear # chases them # the dog and the bird to a tree and they hide in the tree. The tree moves away # from the bear. The bear # finds a big stick and picks it up. The bear # hits a # a # like a palm tree with # the stick. A banana falls down # and hits the bear on the nose. The bear eats the banana. The bear # comes to an apple tree and hits it with the stick. An apple falls off the tree and hits him on the head. Bear eats the apple. The bear goes back to the banana tree and hits it # with the stick but there is something red on top a monkey ok. The monkey falls off the tree and hits him on the head. The monkey gets mad # at the bear. He takes away the bear's stick. The bear wants a banana. The monkey hits the tree with the stick. A whole # bunch of bananas fall off the tree # and hit them both on the head. They share the bananas. XXXII 20e04 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. @End The bird's pecking at the tree. The dog's trying to scare the bird # trying to get to the bird. The dog's barking and the bird stopped pecking. The bird's # turning to look at the down at the dog. It's ignoring the dog and going about its business # keeps pecking. Chopped down top of the tree. Bird chased the dog away. The top of the tree rolled away. Bird's chasing the dog and the top of the tree is flying after the # bird. They are going into # the cave. Dog and the bird go into the cave after the bear. The bear chases both of them out. The dog and the bird hide behind the tree # in the tree. And they move the tree away # hiding behind it. The bear walks away and # picks something up off the ground. He's trying to chop down a tree with # whatever he picked up off the ground. Um # looks like a banana fell out of the tree. Bear eats the banana. Goes to an apple tree # tries to knock apples out of the tree. Apple falls out of the tree. Eats the apple. Walks back to the # banana tree and starts hitting the banana tree. Monkey falls off the top. Monkey's screaming at the bear. Monkey takes the branch away from the bear. They both look up into the tree. Monkey's hitting the # banana tree. A bunch of bananas falls out # hits the bear # on the head # hits the monkey on the head # falls on the ground. Bear and the monkey shake hands and they both eat the bananas. XXXIII 20e05 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. @End There there's a bird pecking on a tree. A dog came # and its staring at the bird # up in the tree. The dog's barking at the bird. okay # the bird turned around to look at the dog. okay # the tree is about to fall. It fell. okay the bird chase started chasing the dog. The tree started chasing the # the bird. okay # the wind blew it away # no now its chasing it for sure. The bear just went in the cave. Dog and the bird just went in the cave. There all three of them were scared out of there. The two # the bird and the dog went in the tree and were hiding from the # bear. The tree moved away # with the bird and the # dog in it. The # bear picked up something and he's looking at it # like a brick or something # wood. okay he's trying to hit at a tree # he is going to try and knock it down. okay he was knocking down and he knocked out a banana # he is gonna pick it up now. He picked it up and started eating it. He's knocking the tree so he can get some apples down now. It fell on his head and it's sitting there on the ground. Picked up the apple and ate it. Now he's knocking the tree # again with the bananas on it there is something else on top of the tree # the monkey. The monkey fell and hit the # bear and its on the ground now # unconscious. The monkey just yelled at the bear because its pissed off at him. Monkey took the club from the um # bear # and it looks like he might hit him. Now they both look up in the tree # where the fruit is. Now the monkey starts hitting the tree cause he wants to get the fruit down. A whole bunch hit both of them on the head and fell to the ground. They shook hands cause they had done a good job and they both started eating the bunch. XXXIV 20e06 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. @End Bird's pecking on a tree. A dog came # and its staring at the bird # up in the tree. Dog's barking at the bird who's pecking on the tree. Bird became intimidated by the dog stopped pecking and looked around to see who was barking at it. Bird looked around # and # turned around and continued pecking on the tree. Bird pecked on the tree until the top fell off. Dog ran away and the bird flew after it. Top of the tree followed # both the dog and the bird. All three came back and past the tree. Bear comes into the cartoon # finds a cave and crawls into it. Dog and the bird come by and enter into the same cave. Bear scares out # both the bird and the dog out of the cave. Bear chases the # bird and the dog into a tree # and stops and looks for them. The tree which contain the bird and the dog cr walks away. Bear is confused walks back # picks up a rock and looks at it. Dog walks to a tree with a rock and bangs the rock on the tree. A piece of fruit falls from the tree onto the bear's head. Bear picks up the fruit that fell from the tree and eats it. After eating the fruit the bear walks to another tree with the same rock and hits the rock onto the tree. An apple falls from the tree hits the bear on the head and lands on the ground. Bear picks up the apple and eats it. Bear picks up the rock walks back to the banana tree and hits it # um something's on top of the tree I don't know what it is # Oh it's a monkey on top of the tree. Monkey falls from top of the tree onto the bear's head and lands to the ground. Monkey becomes mad at the bear for hitting his tree with the rock # and yells at him. Monkey takes the rock out of the bear's hand. Both animals look up at the uh bananas. After looking up at the tree # the monkey takes the rock and hits the tree. After hitting the tree # a batch of bananas falls from the tree onto the ground. Monkey # uh monkey throws the rock away both animals shake hands become friends and # both eat the bananas. XXXV 20e07 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. @End The woodpecker's pecking the tree. A dog appeared out of nowhere and is # looking at the bird trying to figure out what it's doing. Dog's barking at the bird. Bird looks around to see wh where the noise is coming from. And then it just goes back to doing what its doing # just # pecking on the tree. Bird # pecked away through the tree and knocked part of it down. The dog gets kinda scared # not realizing what it is and runs away # and the bird flies after it # I guess either because he's finished doing the tree or he thinks he's gained control and is chasing after the bird one or the other. The top of the tree ran away. xx the tree's chasing # well ok the dog's running away cause its scared # the bird's chasing the dog and the tree's chasing the bird. Bear looks kind of tired so he goes into his cave # or just walks in there. So the # the dog is following and runs into the cave and the bird's running into the cave too looking for shelter I guess xx hide or something. And they're both chased out by the bear. The dog and the bird hide in the tree # and the bear's looking for them. The tree starts moving with the dog and the bear in it they're looking at the bear. Bear looks kind of confused # turns around walks away and picks up like uh a tree stump or a twig a really large # piece of the tree or something. He's looking at it and # hitting it against a a palm tree I guess with bananas or coconuts or something like that I don't # they look like bananas but palm trees don't have # bananas. It is a banana # it's a banana and he was hitting the tree and so one of them # shook down. So I guess he was hungry that's why he was chasing the bird and the dog and he gave up and so he went back and # ate bananas. Now he wants apples so he goes and does the same thing to the apple tree. And an apple falls on his head so he looks down # probably eat it. And he does. I guess he liked the bananas better so he went back to the banana tree # not realizing that there's like a monkey or gorilla on top of the tree and is hitting the tree trying to get the bananas down but. Instead down came the gorilla or monkey # and hit him on the head and fell down beside her. He looks kind of mad and is jumping up and down and trying to scare the bear # frighten him or something # get back at him. He takes away the bear's stick. And they're both looking up at the bananas. Then they look at each other # and the gorilla or the monkey starts hitting the I guess to get the bananas down. Then one of the bunches of bananas fell down hit the bear on the head # hit then it hit the monkey on the head and landed in between them so I guess now they're going to fight over it or something. Instead I guess they decide to become friends they shook hands and just both started eating the bananas. XXXVI 20e08 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. @End I see a woodpecker pecking a tree. The woodpecker continues to peck the tree # and a dog comes running up # and stops at the tree and sits down. The woodpecker continues to peck the tree # the dog looks up at the woodpecker and starts to bark. The woodpecker stops pecking # and stands still # and the dog keeps on staring at him and then the woodpecker turns away. The woodpecker stays turned away then turns back around and starts pecking the tree and the tree appears # to be getting # chipped at the top like it's about ready to fall off. The woodpecker keeps on pecking at the tree and the top of the tree falls down # the woodpecker looks at it and so does the dog. The dog appears to be frightened at what just happened and he runs away and the woodpecker flies after him. The tree stays still for a moment then the part that # fell off chases the bird # and the dog. You now see the dog being followed by the woodpecker # being chased by the tree come back into the picture. You see a cave and a bear approaches the cave and he looks jolly because he keeps on pounding his chest and he # goes into the cave and is out of sight. Next you see # the dog run into the cave # and the woodpecker # fly after him. The bird flies out of the cave # being followed by the dog # being followed by the bear who # lets out a roar. Next you see some ground that's uneven # and you see the dog running # and the bird flying right above him being chased by the bear and they run and hide in the tree and stick their faces out # and the bear # is on the outside and he stares at em. Next the tree moves # with the bird and the dog in it # and the bear stays stationary. The bear turns away # and picks up something that appears to be a piece of wood # and looks at it. The bear takes the wood and uses it it as a tool to # start pounding on a tree possibly to # get something out of the tree. The pounding motion made a banana fall out of the tree # hit him on the head and fall on the ground. The bear drops the wood and eats the whole banana. The bear continues until he reaches an apple tree and he uses the same process as before and hits the tree with a piece of wood. An apple falls from the tree and hits him on the head # falls on the ground # and he looks at it. The bear eats the apple in one bite. The bear picks up the wood and goes back to the # banana tree # and he starts to hit the tree # to get another banana # and meanwhile there's some # strange looking red creature on top of the tree. The creature from the top of the tree which possibly is a monkey falls on the ground # on his back. The thi the animal that fell on the ground is a monkey or a # chimpanzee or something and he gets off his back and jumps up and down # and he yelps at the bear. The monkey stares at the bear and takes his piece of wood from him. Both animals look up at the tree possibly communicating the thought that they # both want bananas. The monkey pounds the tree three times # and # stops. Ah a whole bunch of bananas fall from the tree # and hit the bear on the head # then bounce and hit the monkey on the head and then fall to the ground. The two animals # shake as if they have worked together to # reach a common goal and they both # eat the bananas. XXXVII 20e09 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. @End I just saw a bird pecking on the tree. A dog just came up to the tree and looked up at the bird. The dog's barking at the at the bird in the tree. The bird was looking around at since the dog barked. The bird knowing he was safe went back to # um pecking at the tree. The bird just pecked through the trunk of the tree and it the top part fell off. The bird flew after the dog. The top of the tree just ran after both of the the dog and the bird. The dog and the bird and the tree just ran past the screen. A bear just walked into the cave. The dog and the bird followed the bear into the cave. The bear just tap chased the dog and the bird ou out of the cave. The bear just chased the dog and the bird and they hid # behind in a tree. The tree just moved away with the dog and the bird in the tree. The bear just picked up a # a log. The bear's hitting a palm tree with a log. It was a banana tree and a banana just fell out of the tree. The bea the bear just ate the banana. Now the bear's hitting an apple tree with a log. An apple just fell out of the tree. The bear just ate the apple. The bear's hitting the banana tree again. I think of the bird that just fell out of the tree . It's a monkey # and the monkey just yelled at the bear. Then the monkey just # took the bear's log. And they both # the bear and the monkey both just looked up into the tree. Now the monkey's hitting the tree with a log. This time a whole bunch of bananas fell down # hit the bear on the head then the monkey on the head # then to the ground. The monkey threw a the log away it disappeared # they shook hands # and then they both began to eat the bunch of bananas # together. XXXVIII 20e10 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. @End okay um # the woodpecker's obviously sitting on a branch # um pecking at the tree. A dog um comes running up # and uh # views the woodpecker in the tree sits down below him and observes. The dog begins to bark at the woodpecker and the woodpecker uh stops # um pecking at the tree. The woodpecker looks both ways. And then proceeds to uh go back to his pecking # and in this frame you notice uh # the tree is beginning is becoming smaller # xxx. Uh the top of the tree just fell off # next to the dog. Both the woodpecker and the dog uh # leave the scene. And so does the branch. Uh the next frame the dog uh is running across the # field the bird is the woodpecker is flying behind it and the branch is following # all in a line. In this scene we see a bear crawling into a cave. Followed by the dog and then the bird. Uh first we see uh # the dog and then the bird and then the uh bear come running out and then we hear a growl. In this scene we see the bird flying above the dog running below and the bear following the dog # and uh they come across a tree where the bird # flies into the tree and the dog hides below # in the branches [^ This is great] . Then the tree with the bird and the dog uh leave the scene # with the bear # staying there. The bear uh # leaves the scene and then stumbles across a piece of wood and picks it up. The bear takes the piece of wood and hits um # a banana tree # with it. Ahm # and a banana falls from the tree # and hits the bear on the head and then to the ground. Uh the bear picks up the uh # banana and eats it. Then the bear takes the same club I assume and hits an apple tree with it. The same thing happens an apple drops from the tree hits the bear on the head then xxx to the ground. Um the bear picks up the # apple and eats it. The bear walks back to the banana tree # with the club and hits it twice. Then a man drops out of the tree # falls on the ground. Oh # well I guess it was a monkey # and he gets up and is awfully upset # at the bear. The monkey uh takes the club from the bear. Uh both the animals look up at the bananas # in the tree. Now the monkey hits the tree three times. And from that uh the tree drops an entire bunch of bananas which # falls on top of the bear's head and then bounced to the monkey's head # and then onto the ground. The monkey throws the stick away # um the monkey and the bear shake hands # I guess for they're achievement and begin to eat the bananas. XXXIX 20e11 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. @End Bird in tree pecking at tree. Dog # spots bird and # stops curious. Dog begins to get excited # and # starts to bark. Bird notices something # trys to # figure out what he sees # hears. Bird continues to peck at tree as the top about # top begins to fall off. The top of the tree falls off and the bird stops pecking. Ah dog runs away and the bird follows or flies out of the tree. Top of the tree tray chases the dog and the bird. The dog is being chased by the bird and the bird is being chased by the dog # I mean and the tree is being the bird is being chased by the tree. Bear enters a cave. Dog and the bird # enter the cae ah cave also. The ah # bird flies out of the cave out of the cave dog follows # bear follows also and # makes a noise. The ah # dog # and the bird # hide in a tree as the bear stands and watches # them as there heads are # pointing out of the tree. The tree begins to walk away as the bear freaks out. Being a bit confused it looks like the bear walks away picks something up # and looks at it # I have no idea what it is. The bear picks up a piece of wood and bangs on a # palm tree. Make that a banana tree # he hits the tree to get a banana. The bear eats the banana along with the # skin. The bear moves on to an apple tree and tries to get an apple out of the tree by banging on the # trunk. An apple falls down hits him on the head and the bear looks down # at the apple. The bear drops his ah # piece of wood # and eats the apple. The bear walks back to the banana tree # and begins banging on the banana tree # and there seems to a monkey on top of the tree. Instead of the banana falling the monkey falls out of the tree. The monkey becomes upset and makes his # famous noises. The monkey takes the board away from the bear and # they stand there looking at each other. They both look up # towards the bananas. Now the monkey begins hitting the trunk of the banana tree trying to get down a banana # I guess. A stock of bananas fall to the ground between the bear and the monkey. The monkey and the bear congratulate each other and begin eating the # bananas. XL 20e12 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. @End okay I saw a woodpecker # pecking on a tree. Um a dog # came out of nowhere # and got curious # about the woodpecker. The dog started barking and the woodpecker stopped pecking at the tree. A woodpecker turned his head # to the right. The woodpecker turned back around and started pecking at the tree again. The top of the tree fell off where the woodpecker was pecking # [^ tongue twister] . The dog ran away and the woodpecker flew off. The top of the tree moved off too. The tree was pay chasing the woodpecker that was chasing the dog. A bear went into a cave # on the side of a hill. And the dog and the woodpecker ran inside the cave. All three ran out and the bear growled. The dog and the woodpecker were hiding in a tree and the bear was chasing after them. The tree moved off with the woodpecker and the bear and the dog inside the tree. The bear turned around and picked up the stick that appeared out of nowhere. The bear hit the stick on the side of a tree twice. Banana fell down and hit the bear on the head. A bear ate the banana peel and all. Bear picked up the same stick and pick # and hit an apple tree # on the side twice. And an apple came down and hit the bear on the head. And the bear ate the apple and threw away the stick. A bear walked back over to the banana tree and # hit it again where a monkey was sitting on top. And the monkey came down and hit the bear on the head. And the monkey got upset at the bear. The monkey took the stick from the bear. Um # the bear and the monkey both looked up # at the tree. And the monkey hit the side of the tree three times. And one bunch of bananas came down and first hit the bear # then hit the monkey and then fell to the ground. The bear and the monkey appeared to make friends # and both started eating the bananas. XLI 20e13 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. @End I see a bird pecking on a tree. The bird's continuing to peck on the tree and a dog # runs up to the bird # and looks at it. The bird's pecking on the tree and the dog barks at it. The bird looks around. The bird continues to peck at the tree and the # trunk of the tree is getting smaller. The top of the tree falls off. The dog runs away and then the bird flies away. The top of the tree chases the bird after it. The dog runs by with the bird # flying after it and the top of the tree is following the bird. A red bear enters into a cave. The dog goes into the cave first and then the bird follows. The bird flies out # of the cave the dog follows and then the bear growls xxx chasing both of them. The dog is running and the bird is flying above him and they run into a bush # and the bear is following them # and then # they both look out at the bear # while hiding in the bush. The bush walks away. The bear's walking and he picks up his shadow . The bear walks over to a tree and hits what he haves what he has in his hand against a tree. Something falls from the top of the tree probably something you can eat. The bear ate what fell. The bear goes to another tree and knocks on the trunk with the same apparatus in his hand. A piece of fruit hits him on the head and it falls to the ground # and he looks at it. He picks it up and he eats it. The bear walks to another tree # and knocks on it to get food but he doesn't realize there is a monkey on top of the tree. The monkey falls in # on his head and then to the ground. The monkey screams at the bear. The monkey takes the apparatus away from the bear. They both look up at the top of the tree. They both look at the top of the tree # and the monkey proceeds to hit the trunk of the tree. Part of the top of the tree falls and hits the bear on the head and the monkey and then to the ground. The monkey throws away the stick and the bear and the monkey shake hands # and they # start eating the bananas that had fallen # from the tree. XLII 20e14 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. @End Woodpecker pecking on a tree. Woodpecker pecking on a tree dog runs from the back # and sits down # beside the tree # and watches the woodpecker. The dog starts barking at the woodpecker pecking in the tree who stops for a moment. Woodpecker looks around. He starts pecking on the tree again. He pecked on the tree until the # tree # fell I guess # the top of the tree fell. The woodpecker flew away and the dog ran off. The tree branch got up and # and ran after em too. The # dog ran after the woodpecker who just flew by # and the top of the tree was following the dog. A grizzly bear went into the cave # . The dog went in the cave # and the woodpepper pecker flew in the cave # following the dog. The bear chased after the woodpecker and um # dog. The dog and the woodpecker hid in the tree # and the # grizzly bear is # just standing there sitting there I guess. The tree moved away with the wood woodpecker and the # dog in it. The grizzly bear # began to walk away and stood up # what is that a stick # and picked up he picked up a stick and stood up. Now the grizzly bear is hitting on the tree with the # stick # or is it an ax . A banana fell from the tree # and the xxx the grizzly bear is looking down at it now # . The grizzly bear ate the banana. The grizzly bear is knocking on a another tree which apparently is an apple tree . An apple fell out of the tree and hit the grizzly bear on the head. The grizzly bear ate the apple. The grizzly bear is knocking on the tree again # the banana tree this time a monkey is sitting on top. Monkey fell out of the tree on the grizzly bear's head # and then to the ground . Monkey jumping up and down # screaming at the grizzly bear. The monkey took the stick from the grizzly bear. They both looked up # the monkey and the grizzly bear. The monkey hit the tree three times with the stick. A bunch of bananas fell down from the tree hit the grizzly bear on the head then it hit the monkey on the head then it fell down in the middle # of the two of them. The grizzly bear and the monkey shook hands # and now they are sharing the bananas. XLIII II. References II.I. Literature Applebee, Arthur N. 1978. The child’s concept of story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bamberg, Michael G.W. 1947 (1987). The acquisition of narratives: learning how to use language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Barrett, Martyn. 1995 (1996). Early lexical development. The Handbook of child language, ed. by Paul Fletcher and Brian MacWhinney, 362–392. Oxford: Blackwell. Bartlett, Frederic. 1932. Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bloom, Louis. 1998. Language acquisition in its developmental context. Handbook of Child Psychology, vol 2: Cognition, perception and language, ed. by Kuhn and R. Siegler, 309-370. New York: Wiley. Garvey, C. (1984). Children's talk. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bloom, Paul. 1963 (2001). How children learn the meaning of words. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Clark, Eve V. 1979. The ontogenesis of meaning. Wiesbaden: Athenaion. ----. 1993 (1994). The lexicon in acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halliday, M.A.K. 1976 (1979). Cohesion in English. London: Longman. XLIV Karmiloff-Smith, Annette. (1979). A study of determiners and reference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Labov, William. 1972. Language in the inner city. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lyons, Christopher. 1980. The meaning of the English definite article. The semantics of determiners, ed. by Johan van der Auwera, 81–95. London: Croom Helm. ----. 1999. Definiteness. Cambrigde: Cambrigde University Press. Mandler, Jean Matter. 1983. Representation. Handbook of child psychology, ed. by Mussen P. Fourth edition; Vol 3. New York: Wiley. Maratsos, Michael P. 1976. The use of definite and indefinite reference in young children. An experimental study of semantic acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, Katherine. 1988. Acquisition of words by first language learners. Child Language: A reader, ed. by Magery F. Franklin and Sybil S. Barten, 50–59. Oxford University Press. New York. Swan, Michael. 1980. Practical English usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tannen, Deborah. 1993. Framing in Discourse. What’s in a frame? Surface evidence for underlying expectations, ed. by Deborah Tannen, 14–56. Oxford: Oxford University Press. XLV II.II. Internet Sources CHILDES Corpus www.childes.psy.cmu.edu (02.11.2005) Labov, William. Uncovering the event structure of narrative. (02.11.2005) www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/home.html (02.11.2005) www.wikipedia.org (02.11.2005) XLVI II.III. CD–ROM: Cartoon Eidesstattliche Erklärung Hiermit versichere ich, dass ich die vorliegende Arbeit selbstständig verfasst und keine anderen als die angegebenen Quellen und Hilfsmittel verwendet habe. Saarbrücken, den 3. November 2005 Kerstin Borau