Abstract
We tell stories to entertain our audience and to explain our actions. Stories transmit cultural and individual traditions, values, and moral codes. They explicate observable actions and events in terms of unobservable goals and motives, thoughts and emotions. Stories manipulate place and time to present temporal and causal sequences that are extraordinary. Storytelling is one of the first uses of language (Halliday, 1975; Keenan, 1974; Weir, 1960) and one of the most skilled (Lord, 1960; Watson-Gegeo & Boggs, 1977). Storytelling and understanding are verbal arts that children gradually master between 2 and 10 years of age. In developing narrative competence, children learn to produce and comprehend causally and temporally structured plots that are organized around a variety of themes and involve a myriad of characters.
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Froggie goes crash in the water, bumps his head. And he fell in dirt. He cried. Then he bumped his head off. (2-year-old boy, Pitcher & Prelinger, 1963, p. 34)
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(2)
Once there was an alligator who lived in New York City and all the children were his friends and he wouldn’t hurt anybody. And one day he got a note saying, “Mr. Alligator, I hate you.” And Mr. Alligator always kept feeling bad because everybody liked him. But while he was walking through the grocery store he saw little girl writing a note. The note said, “Mr. Alligator, I hate you.” And he asked the little girl why she hated him. The girl said, “Because you’re taking my friends away from me. They always want to play with you.” Mr. Alligator said, “Why don’t you play with me too?” And she said, “My mother doesn’t like alligators and won’t let me. She thinks they’ll bite.” So Mr. Alligator went to the little girl’s house and said to her mother, “I’m not going to bite anybody.” And the little girl’s mother said, “All right, I can see that.” The alligator said, “Good, so everybody else can play with me.” (10-year-old boy, Sutton-Smith, 1981, p. 290)
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Kemper, S. (1984). The Development of Narrative Skills: Explanations and Entertainments. In: Kuczaj, S.A. (eds) Discourse Development. Springer Series in Cognitive Development. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-9508-9_5
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