Running head: EVALUATIVE DEVICES USED IN NARRATIVES BY A YOUNG BOY

Evaluative Devices Used in Narratives by a Young Boy

Yvonne M. Boeskool

Calvin College
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Abstract

The present study examines one young boy’s narrative speech in light of five previous studies

that have examined children’s narrative abilities in many different experimental contexts such as

varying age, gender, socio-economic status, genre, prompting, and mode of narration. This

paper then focuses on the use of evaluative devices used in the boy’s narratives, considering how

his evaluative patterns are affected by his age, gender, socio-economic status. It also takes into

consideration the genre of the narratives present in the transcript examined as well as logistical

factors such as discourse and the spoken mode of narration.

Keywords: narratives, evaluative devices, evaluation, genre, language development

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Evaluative Devices Used in Narratives by a Young Boy

Introduction

There are many ways in which the narrative abilities of children have been assessed in

past research, due to the fact that narrative growth is an important factor in the language

development of school-age children. A narrative is defined as any chronological report of

events, either fictional or non-fictional. Narratives include reference, simply the description of

what happened, and evaluation, the context clues about why the events may have occurred

(Eaton, Collis, & Lewis, 1999).

More specifically than studying the general development of narratives in children, many

researchers have decided to focus on the use of evaluation in child narratives. Many early

findings show that narratives of the early childhood contain very little evaluation. Until age six,

children have not been known to discuss mental states or motives of themselves or others when

narrating an events (Eaton et al., 1999). Peterson and Biggs (2001) pointed out that most of the

studies done in the past focused simply on the amount of emotional evaluation the children use,

rather than differentiating by different types. These researchers discussed the example of a child

stating “I was really, really, really mad!” They pointed out that this sentence is not only an

emotional evaluation because of the word “mad,” but also because of the word “really,” the

repetition, and the phonological stress marked by the exclamation point in the transcript. Shiro

(2003) observed that evaluative devices cannot occur on their own, though; they must have some

referential elements with them in order to make a clear and cohesive narrative.

Many studies have been conducted examining the frequency of evaluative devices

developmentally. The first aim of Eaton et al. (1999) was to investigate the frequency in use of

evaluative devices by children in narrating story sequences. Children ranging from age four to
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twelve were shown a three-minute silent video from a local theatre group. They found that there

was, in fact, an age-related increase in the use of evaluative explanations of the video. Peterson

and Biggs (2001) came to a similar conclusion in studying the narrative abilities of three-, five-,

and eight-year-olds. A recent study, however, shows different results in the context of middle to

late childhood. Drijbooms, Groen, and Verhoeven (2017) sought out to add to existing research

on children’s use of evaluative devices, particularly in middle to late childhood, where there was

little research done in the past. These researchers considered ten categories of evaluative

devices in their study. One factor in choosing their ten categories was that they all rely on

complex language skills and/or socio-cognitive skills that tend to develop around the age of the

children in the study. This study aimed to explore how the use of evaluative language compared

in fourth to sixth graders, expecting both diversity and frequency to increase, and to compare and

contrast the evaluative language between spoken and written narrative forms. Dutch children, of

middle to middle-high socio-economic status, were assessed first in fourth grade and then later in

sixth grade. The assessment of spoken narratives was conducted with each child individually,

using a wordless picture book. The assessment of written narratives was conducted in the

company of all the other children, using a different wordless picture book. These researchers

found that the diversity of evaluative devices that the children used did not increase between

fourth and sixth grade. It even decreased a small amount in the spoken context. They found that

some specific evaluative devices even decreased in frequency between fourth and sixth grades.

For example, direct speech was used less in sixth graders’ spoken and written narratives than in

fourth graders’. Sixth graders’ narratives, however, were still more effective because they gave

more necessary information such as reference to the identities of the characters, and indications

of turn-taking in the dialogue of the story being described.

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Children’s narrative abilities have been assessed in terms of factors other than age as

well. Peterson and Biggs (2001) set out to examine how gender affected patterns in narrative

abilities. This study examined how children talk about three different given emotions: happy,

mad, and surprised. The researchers hypothesized that boys would do more labeling of the

emotion of anger because it has been proven that mothers tend to talk with boys about anger

more than girls. The three-, five-, and eight-year-olds were assessed on their response to each

emotion prompted to them by the interviewer who first gave a personal example of each. The

narratives were first searched for emotion labels, then for the presence of nine different

evaluative devises. They found that both boys and girls at all ages produced a relatively equal

amount of labels about happy experiences and experiences of surprise. When speaking of

experiences of anger, however, five-year-old boys used three times as many emotion labels as

their female peers. They also found that three-year-old boys produced fewer evaluative devices

than three-year-old girls, but this gender difference was only evident at this age.

Children’s narrative abilities have also been assessed in alignment with their socio-

economic status. Shiro (2003) found that children of high socio-economic status increased their

use of evaluative devices in fiction narratives significantly from first grade to fourth grade, while

children of low socio-economic status did not. Overall, she concluded that there is a larger gap

between social classes in fictional narrative abilities than in personal narrative abilities,

suggesting that the use of evaluation in narratives is not a skill that automatically transfers from

one genre to another.

Her study of genre affecting narrative development is important to discuss. All five of

the studies in this paper did attempt to differentiate between genres of narratives, but Shiro

(2003) studied them explicitly. She discussed two different approaches to studying genre in
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narrative development of children: defining genre in terms of sources of knowledge and defining

genre in terms of the viewpoint of the child performing the narration. Shiro then set out to find

whether the use of evaluative devices varied between fictional and personal narratives. She also

aimed to explore the possible relationship between the use of these evaluative devices and socio-

economic status. She expected the function of evaluative language to be different based on the

two genres because of the differences in perspective. The study used monolingual Spanish-

speaking first and fourth grade children in a combination of public and private schools in

Caracas, Venezuela. The subjects were each given two fictional story tasks and two personal

narrative tasks. Shiro found that the most frequent evaluative device used among both genres

was perception. In fact, both genres showed near equal use of all the evaluative devices except

for expressions of relation, which was used more frequently in fictional than in personal

narratives. Additionally, most of the children used evaluative devices in 40-60% of the clauses

in fictional narratives, and in 30-50% of the clauses in personal narratives, suggesting that an

individual child tends to evaluate more in a fictional story than in a personal narrative.

Similarly, Longobardi, Spataro, Renna, and Rossi-Arnaud (2014) conducted a study on

children in third, fourth, and fifth grade in an urban area of Rome, Italy. The children were

assessed on their narrative writing abilities in three different genres: fictional and personal

narrative, as well as hypothetical narrative. One of the aims of this study was to determine if

there are differences between the three narrative genres in the frequency and use of mental-state

language. The researchers found that mental-state words were used significantly more in

fictional and personal narratives than they were in hypothetical narratives. They also found that

fifth-graders tended to produce more mental-state words than third-graders, particularly in the

hypothetical narrative genre. This suggests that although this genre does not prompt children to
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use the same amount of mental-state language that fictional and personal narratives do at early

ages, hypothetical narratives are affected by developmental growth.

There are other external factors that affect narrative performance as well. The second

goal of the Eaton et al. (1999) study was to see if giving children specific prompts would

increase their use of evaluative devices. The children were divided into two groups: one was

given specific prompts to respond to in between each scene, and one was simply asked to explain

the story in their own words. Each child’s transcript was then dissected into two categories:

narrative clauses and evaluative clauses. These evaluative clauses were then broken down into

six different categories. What the researchers found was that the amount of evaluatives used by

the children given prompts did not vary by age nearly as much as that of children not given

prompts, suggesting that it is possible to get children to use more evaluatives by employing

specific prompt questions. The study also aimed to discover if five-year-olds are able to use a

global evaluative perspective in narratives. The researchers found that the group provided with

prompts did, in fact, provide global causal explanations of the mental states of the characters

based on the outcome of the story. Most of the children described the final outcome of the story

as happy, despite a very sad scene. The researchers also found that even five-year-olds are able

to evaluate both specific scenes of a story and the story as a whole when provided with prompts.

It is also important to note the difference between modes of narration. The Drijbooms et

al. (2017) study sought out to compare the use of evaluative devices in spoken narratives to

written narratives, which also enhances previous research. The researchers discovered that

children used a wider range of evaluative devices in their written narratives than in their spoken

narratives. For example, evaluative devices that are considered markers of decontextualized

language, such as figurative languages, direct speech, and intellectual terms, were found more
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frequently in children’s’ written narratives. Some categories, however, such as perceptual terms,

negative qualifiers, and hedges, did not increase when children were writing and instead were

more evident in spoken narratives. They also used more evaluative devices all together in in

written as opposed to spoken work.

The following study examines one young boy’s narrative speech in light of the studies

discussed above.

Method

Participants

This study examines the language transcript of a young boy named Ross. Ross was born

on December 25, 1977, putting him between 31 and 41 months old (two and three years old) at

the times the samples were taken (July of 1980 to May of 1981). The experimenter was Ross’s

father, Brian MacWhinney, a university professor. Ross was a member of the white, upper

middle-class population.

Procedure

Using Ross’ transcript, I divided all of his evaluative clauses into the following eleven

categories: emotion, cognition, perception, intention, evaluative comments, causal connectives,

hedges, intensifiers, negative qualifiers, onomatopoeia, and reported speech. These categories

are adapted from a combination of the studies I used above (Drijbooms et al., 2017; Eaton et al.,

1999; Peterson & Biggs, 2001; Shiro, 2003). Table 1 shows how I define each evaluative device

with examples from Ross’ speech.

Table 1
Emotion Refers to the feelings of any character in the narrative, including explicitly
stating the emotion (“They were happy to go.”) as well as showing evidence
of an emotion (“The little boy’s daddy cried and cried.”).
Cognition Represents thoughts or beliefs of characters in the narrative, such as “They
decided to build a house out of bricks.”
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Perception Refers to anything that is perceived by a characters senses, such as “I saw big
monsters on TV.”
Intention Refers to any character’s intention of doing something in the narrative such as
“They tried to hide where the big bad wolf can’t find you.”
Evaluative Represents any physical states or judgements about the qualities of the
Comments characters, objects, or situations in the narrative, such as “The jelly boy was
little.”
Causal Refers to the use of connectives (like “because” or “that’s why”) that explain
Connectives the story’s sequence, such as “But they couldn’t rope him because he was
sweet.”
Hedges Refers to devices used to suggest uncertainty on the part of the narrator, such
as “probably” or “might be.”
Intensifiers Refers to any way that the narrator emphasizes words or ideas, including
repetition (“And they went up… up, up, up, up.”), and lexical markers (“It’s
real dangerous.”), as well as phonological stress (“’The big bad wolf came
and went, “who’s! that! chopping! on! my! heart!’”).
Negative Refers to any time that the narrator points out what did not happen in the
Qualifiers story, such as “He doesn’t shoot anybody.”
Onomatopoeia Refers to any instance in which the narrator vocalizes a sound that occurs in
the story, such as “The motorcycles went zum zum.”
Reported Refers to any time that the narrator states what a character in the narrative
Speech says, including direct speech (“The swimming teacher says ‘It’s time to get
out.’”) as well as indirect speech (“Lady yelled at snake.”).

I counted up all instances of each of these eleven devices in Ross’ transcript to find which he

used the most and which he used the least. It is important to note that many of the evaluative

clauses Ross used are examples of multiple evaluative devices. For example, the phrase

“…because it’s real dangerous,” found in Ross’ speech is an example of a causal connective (due

to the word “because”), an intensifier (due to the word “real”), and an evaluative comment (due

to the word “dangerous”).

Results

Figure 1 shows the results of Ross’ use of evaluative devices in comparison to each other.

For visual purposes, I separated reported speech into two subcategories: direct and indirect

reported speech.

Figure 1
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Direct reported speech is the most commonly used device, followed by evaluative comments,

and then causal connectives. There was no use of hedges in Ross’ transcript.

Discussion

If we look at Ross’ use of evaluative devices from a developmental standpoint, it is easy

to see that he is advanced for his age. Ross was only two and three years old at the time these

transcripts were recorded. Eaton et al. (1999) studied the development of evaluative devices in

four to twelve-year-olds, meaning that they did not even examine evaluation in children Ross’

age because two- and three-year-olds have seldom mastered the use of evaluative devices. That

is why it is impressive that Ross used a substantial amount of each one, with the exception of

hedges. As a continuation of this study, it would be interesting to further examine Ross’ results

by studying how Ross’ use of each evaluative device compared over the ten months the

transcript was recorded in.

When examining Ross’ results from a gender-related perspective like Peterson and Biggs

(2001), it is interesting to take into account the fact that he is a boy and did use ten emotional

evaluations. The content of these evaluations, though, ranged from anger to happiness (the one
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evident in the example). Since I have no transcripts of a female subject to compare Ross to, it is

impossible to make judgments about how his gender affects his use of evaluative devices. I do

not have much evidence of the effect of his socio-economic status either, but it is important to

note that he is part of the upper middle-class, in light of Shiro’s (2003) findings about the greater

development of children of high socio-economic status compared to children of low socio-

economic status.

It is also important to note the element of genre in Ross’ results. His narratives contain a

fairly even combination of personal and fictional narratives. It would be interesting to examine

how each evaluative device is distributed between the two genres, but that would make this paper

a lot longer. On the topic of using prompts in the collection of children’s narratives, it is

important to point out that Ross’ transcript does not contain only him speaking. Most of the

episodes recorded are in conversation with Ross’ father. This dialogue provides prompt-like

conditions for Ross’ utterances. This could be a factor in the evaluative devices he used. Lastly,

it is also important to recognize that Ross’ transcript is a sample of his spoken language, and not

written like in the studies of Drijbooms et al. (2017) and Longobardi et al. (2014).
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References

Drijbooms, E., Groen, M. A., & Verhoeven, L. (2017, July). Children's use of evaluative devices

in spoken and written narratives. Journal of Child Language, 44(4), 767-794.

Eaton, J. H., Collis, G. M., & Lewis, V. A. (1999, October). Evaluative explanations in children's

narratives of a video sequence without dialogue. Journal of Child Language, 26(3), 699-

720.

Longobardi, E., Spataro, P., Renna, M., & Rossi-Arnaud, C. (2014, June). Comparing fictional,

personal, and hypothetical narratives in primary school: story grammar and mental state

language. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 29(2), 257-275.

Peterson, C., & Biggs, M. (2001, December). "I was really, really, really mad!" Children's use of

evaluative devices in narratives about emotional events. Sex Roles, 45(11/12), 801-825.

Shiro, M. (2003, February). Genre and evaluation in narrative development. Journal of Child

Language, 30(1), 165-195.