imagination & talk

[Ann Dowker]

You may be interested in the following:

Carol Fox: At the Very Edge of the Forest; Cassell, 1993

Vivian Gussin Paley: Wally's Stories; Harvard University Press, 1981

Vivian Gussin Paley: Bad Guys Don't Have Birthdays: Fantasy Play at
Four; University of Chicago Press, 1988

C. Peterson and A. McCabe: Developmental Psycholinguistics: Three Ways of
Looking at a Child's Narrative; Plenum Press, 1983

C. Peterson and A. McCabe: Parental styles of narrative elicitation:
effect on children's narrative structure and content. First Language,
1992, 12, 299-321.

Brian Sutton-Smith: The Folkstories of Children; University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1980


and a few of the papers in the 1998 special issue of Cahiers de
Psychologie/ Current Psychology of Cognition (CPC) dedicated to "Language
play in children"; e.g.

C. Fox: Serious play: the relationship between children's oral invented
stories and their learning. CPC, 1998, 17(2), 211-228

T. Musatti, E. Veneziano and S. Mayer: Contributions of language to early
pretend play. CPC, 1998, 17(2), 155-184

and especially:

A. McCabe: At Nicky's house: developing imagination to deal with
reality. CPC, 1998, 17(2), 229-244.

Some of Howard Gardner's and Ellen Winner's work on early metaphor and
imagination may also be relevant.

It's probably too far from your student's area, but a lot of my own work
has looked at children's play with language, and especially at the
phonological and syntactic devices used in their 'poems'.

Ann

 On Tue, 19 Nov 2002, Brian MacWhinney wrote:

> 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
> >