imagination & talk

[Brian MacWhinney]

On 11/19/02 8:55 PM, "Carolyn Chaney" <cchaney at sfsu.edu> wrote:

> 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
> 
> 

Dear Carolyn,

My boys (MacWhinney corpus) had imaginary friends, but finding the passages
that discuss them could be tough.  The most remarkable figure was a fellow
called "Foot Man" created in kindergarten by Ross and his friends.  The rest
was all standard super-heroes.  Mark looked up to Dracula, because he was
such a ladies' man.  Ross liked He-Man.  He also memorized whole chunks of
passages from Star Wars and was continually talking about Luke, Wampas, Han,
and the whole bunch.  Looking for the names of Star Wars heroes can find
this stuff.  I used to tell them stories about the "boy with a golden heart"
and boy who was taken on voyages by the SandMan, but I'm afraid I didn't
tape many of these.

Imaginary figures are central to most of the imaginary scenarios in our
family.  In other situations, children plan trips and meals.  I would look
for words like "pretend" and "suppose" or "let's say" and "let's play".

I don't know the Kuczaj data too well, but I know there is an immense amount
of fantasy talk and play there.

Daniela Barbier (zelith at web.de) did a lovely "wissenschaftliche Arbeit" for
the English Linguistics department at the Universität des Saarlandes in
which she analyzes lots of CHILDES interactions with an emphasis on dispute.
Perhaps you could get her insights on your questions.

--Brian MacWhinney