Dear Colleagues,
I am happy to announce the addition to CHILDES of a new corpus of
French picture sequence descriptions from
Monique Vion and Annie Colas of the Université de Provence. The
subjects were 7, 9, and 11 year-olds and the
experimental design specifically compared logically ordered vs.
arbitrary picture sequences. Many thanks to Monique
and Annie for these transcripts. The complete readme file follows.
--Brian MacWhinney
This corpus was designed to study the cognitive constraints (memory
based and/or inferential) that affect the establishment and management
of links between events. The general hypothesis was that the linguistic
expressions that structure discourse are the manifestation of
conceptual constraints imposed by the information management process.
By varying the conditions of information availability, inference
making, and thematic continuity in pictorial narratives (silent comic
strips), we provided verbalizing conditions that were more or less
favorable to establishing conceptual relationship.
Each comic strip contained eight frames (8 x 8 cm). The first frame
showed two characters. All subsequent frames showed only one of the two
characters carrying out various activities. A minimal link between the
frames was achieved by the continuous presence of one of the characters
from the first frame.
Four different comic strip versions were constructed using a factorial
combination of two variables: thematic continuity and layout. The
first variable concerned “thematic continuity”. In the maintained topic
condition, the materials were designed in such a way that a topic would
be induced after the first frame by the repeated presence of the same
character in every frame, up to and including the last one. In the
changed topic condition, the materials were designed in such a way that
a thematic break was generated by the reintroduction in the last
picture of the other character from the first frame (in other words,
frame 1 had both characters, frames 2 through 7 showed only one of the
two characters, and frame 8 showed only the other). The second
variable was a secondary one used to control the layout of the
characters in the frames. To avoid any bias in referent marking brought
about by the greater salience of one of the two characters due to its
location in the picture, the layout (left, right) of the characters in
the first frame was counterbalanced.
The comic strips differed as to whether event sequence was arbitrary or
ordered. In the arbitrary sequences, the events although presented as a
sequence, could have occurred in any order (e.g., in A1, the daily
activities depicted are relatively independent of each other, and thus
required inference making: the woman getting dressed -or undressed-
could have been placed after the women putting on -or taking off- her
makeup, or anywhere else in the sequence, for that matter). In this
case, the speaker's had to infer the links between the pictures from
the proposed sequence in order to build an overall representation of
one story. In the ordered sequences, the order of the events could not
be changed (e.g., in O12, before potentially catching a fish, the man
had to put on his fishing gear, go to the water's edge, and cast the
line). The ordered sequences still did not have a script structure
because the normal sequence of events was modified by the sudden
appearance of an obstacle. The obstacle was always an event over which
the main character had little or no control. In some of the comic
strips, the obstacle interrupted the causal chain of events (e.g., in
O15, the car hit a hedgehog crossing the road). In others, the obstacle
did not interrupt the causal chain but created a surprise effect that
sometimes substantially changed the expected course of events (e.g., in
O16, the air bubble the fish entered so it could fly burst) and
sometimes did not (e.g., in 013 the cereal bowl fell and made a hat for
the cat hanging on the tablecloth). For each type of sequence, the
materials consisted of 32 test comic strips (8 pairs of characters x 4
versions).
The last variable manipulated was the frame display mode. In the
simultaneous display mode, all pictures were on one page. The speaker
was asked to look at the comic strip and to prepare to tell the story
immediately afterwards. In the consecutive display mode, the comic
strip was presented in booklet format, with one picture per page.
Subjects were instructed to turn the pages one by one and to say what
was happening on each page. As such, the events had to be verbalized
on-line, as they were discovered.
Participants
One hundred and ninety-one native French-speaking subjects (98 males
and 93 females) participated in the study. There were 63 seven-year-old
children (attending first grade), 64 nine-year-old children (attending
third grade), 64 eleven-year-old children (attending fifth grade).
Data collection design
Each speaker was tested in only one frame display mode and on one type
of sequence. During testing, a given participant saw eight test comic
strips (each presented in one of the four versions).
Procedure
Testing was individual and lasted approximately 20 minutes. In the room
where the experiment took place, there were three persons, the speaker,
the experimenter, and the addressee of the narration. The addressee was
a same-age peer from the speaker's grade in school. He/she only acted
as listener once during the experiment.
Recording
1528 narratives were audiotaped in several public elementary school in
Aix-en-Provence (Château-Double, Henri Wallon, Les Granettes) and
Luynes (public elementary school and St François d'Assise) France. We
would like to thank Delphine Baigue and Aïcha Idriss-Abdalla (graduate
students at the time) for their help in preparing the materials and
collecting the data.
Pictures
The description of the picture stimuli is as follows. First, the
arbitrary sequences:
A1: Un homme et une femme (A man and a woman)
A2: Un adolescent et un garçonnet (An adolescent and a little boy)
A3: Un homme et un adolescent (A man and an adolescent)
A4: Une femme et une fillette (A woman and a little girl)
A5: Une tortue et un crocodile (A tortoise and a crocodile)
A6: Un singe et un lion (A monkey and a lion)
A7: Une poule et des poussins (A hen and chicks)
A8: Un chat et un âne (A cat and a donkey)
And then the ordered sequences:
O9: Garçon et grand-père (Boy and grand-father)
O10: Homme et femme (Man and woman)
O11: Garçon et fille à la plage (Boy and girl at the beach
O12: Fils et père à la pêche (Son and father fishing)
O13: Chien et chat (Dog and cat)
O14: Ver et escargot (Worm and snail)
O15: Hérisson et lapin (Hedgedog and rabbit)
O16: Poisson et grenouille (Fish and frog)
File names are constructed using the first three number for the
participant ID and the fourth and fifth for the age (07, 09 and 11).
Then come three letters. The first two are either im (arbitrary) or ex
(ordered) and the last is either g (simultaneous) or s (consecutive).
The gem codes in the files begin with V for vignette. Then there is a
number for a picture number of the letter “u” for the picture series 2
through 7 and then the letter “m” for maintaining topic or “c” for
changing topic. If the child went straight from the “u” sequence on to
sequence 8 without a break, then the CHAT will include +… followed by
+^ as in this example:
(end of VU) *CHI: après il joue du piano +...
(V8m) *CHI: +^ et il va se coucher à l'ombre.
Researchers using these data should cite one of these sources:
Vion, M., & Colas A. (1998). L'introduction des référents dans le
discours en français: contraintes cognitives et développement des
compétences narratives. L'Année Psychologique, 98, 37-59.
Vion, M., & Colas, A. (1999a) Maintaining and reintroducing referents
in French: cognitive constraints and development of narrative skills.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 72, 32-50.
Vion, M., & Colas, A. (1999b). Expressing coreference in French:
cognitive constraints and development of narrative skills. Journal of
Psycholinguistic Research, 28, 261-291.
Vion, M., & Colas, A. (2000) Mode de recueil et outil d’analyse d’un
corpus de parole spontanée étudié d’un point de vue psycholinguistique.
TIPA, 19, 155-167.
Vion, M., & Colas, A. (2005). Using connectives in oral French
narratives: cognitive constraints and development of narrative skills.
First Language, 25.
Vion, M., & Colas, A. On the use of the connective “and” in oral French
narration: a developmental study. Journal of Child language.
(submitted).
Vion, M., & Colas, A. La plannification des unités prosodiques dans la
narration: contrôle intentionnel et contraintes opérationnelles. TIPA,
(submitted).
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