imagination & talk

[Carolyn Chaney]

One of my undergraduate students has a 3-year-old niece who regularly
shifts the topic of conversation into an imaginary scenario that may or
may not be triggered by the conversational context.  My student is
interested in analyzing the conversations as a way of getting a peek at
the child's imagination and how it is expressed linguistically.

Having searched childes, we are not coming up with much in the way of
previous research on this kind of phenomena...have you encountered it?
Can anyone suggest key words we may not have tried (we've given imag* and
creativ* a go) or know of papers on this subject?

Thanks for any help.

Carolyn Chaney