幼児・児童のお話作りにおける因果的産出能力の発達

抄録

This study was an attempt to investigate children's (4, 5, 6, 8 years old) narrative skills in terms of causal sequencing. Ss were asked to produce two stories from two sets of nine pictures. If Ss couldn't continue telling, the experimenter prompted them by either strong or weak prompts. First, each story protocol was analyzed into propositions and categorized by content (actions, object states, person's states, mental states); then, stated causal relations were categorized into four types, i.e. Resultant, Initiation, Enablement, and Motivation. The major results were as follows. 1) The numbers of phrases and propositions, and of causal production increased with age. 2) Older children could mention the character's mental states more than younger children. 3) The types of causal relations changed with age. Initially, children's stories were linked together with action-states relations. From 6-years old almost all children could use causal relations with mental states. 4) Strong prompts seemed to have more effect on quantity than weak prompts. But the condition of prompting was unfortunately confounded with frequency of prompts in this study. A more careful study should be planned in the future.