Abstract
Reese, E., Haden, C. A., Baker-Ward, L., Bauer, P., Fivush, R., & Ornstein, P. A. (2011). Coherence of personal narratives across the life span: A multidimensional model and coding method. Journal of Cognition and Development, 12, 424–462.
Nearly all the work on narrative development, particularly in children with any type of language impairment, has focused on development of a single fictional story or a personal story of a single event. There is no research available on how children and adolescents with language impairment begin to put narratives of individual experiences together to form a life story. Considering the difficulty they typically have with producing individual narratives, one expects that they would have even greater difficulties generating coherent life stories.
Life stories are integrations of past autobiographical narratives for single events. In life stories, tellers integrate their past experiences with their present concerns and future goals (McAdams, 2001). Life stories provide our lives with unity and purpose. They give us a sense of identity. Through life stories, the self is integrated synchronically and diachronically. Synchronic integration involves the integration of the wide range of different and possibly conflicting roles and relations in our lives. We all have multiple roles, for example, student, SLP, daughter, mother, niece, aunt, artist, musician, bicyclist. Diachronic integration is the way we integrate ourselves through time. This synchronic and diachronic integration enables us to explain who and why we are. Through narrative identity, people convey to themselves and others who they are now, how they came to be, and where they think their lives may be going in the future. Persons create their identity by constructing stories about their lives. If students have difficulty constructing coherent stories of single autobiographical memories, they will have difficulty constructing coherent life stories; and without coherent life stories they are likely to have difficulties with self-regulation, planning, and problem solving. Once students with language impairments or autism are able to produce reasonably complete and coherent personal narratives, SLPs should begin to evaluate students’ ability to generate coherent life stories.
In WoM 27.1, I reviewed an article on life story development in children (Bohn & Berntsen, 2008). The authors describe how life stories develop between 8 years and young adulthood. They explained four types of coherence that are important in life stories:
Temporal coherence: the ability to order events chronologically
Causal coherence: telling the life narrative in terms of motives and causes
Thematic coherence: the ability to create overarching themes in a narrative and to establish thematic similarities between various events
Cultural coherence: shared normative expectations concerning appropriate and probable life sequences
Reese and colleagues (Reese et al., 2011; Reese, Yan, Hack, & Hayne, 2010) have proposed protocols for eliciting life stories and rubrics for assessing life stories that can be useful for SLPs.
Reese et al. (2011) designed the Emerging Life Story Interview (ELSI) to evaluate children’s and adolescents’ ability to organize life events into lifetime periods. They told 8- to 12-year-old students that they wanted to hear about some important things that had happened to them. They asked the children to think about their lives as a story in a book and if they wanted to tell their life story, what would the chapters be. Children were prompted to go as far backward in time as they wished to name all the chapters in their lives and to relate a few events from each chapter. Then, the children were encouraged to go forward in time from their first chapter to make sure that they had touched all the important periods in their lives. Participants receive a point for each chapter that was supported by at least one specific memory. In the second part of the ELSI, children were prompted with, “Now try to think of one particular thing that happened in an earlier chapter that changed your life. It should be something that happened to you that’s still really important now.” Who was there? How did you feel? How did others feel? How did this event change your life? Students’ organization of their life stories linked to well-being in early adolescence as measured by Harter’s Self-Perception Profile (Harter, 1982).
Reese and colleagues (Reese et al., 2011) developed a Narrative Coherence Coding Scheme (NCCS) that can be used to evaluate individual personal narratives or life stories. They combined Bohn and Berntsen’s (2008) temporal and causal coherence into a single temporal coherence, maintained the thematic coherence, and added a category of contextual coherence. They applied the NCCS to personal narratives of preschoolers, school-aged students, and adults. For each coherence category, they proposed 0- to 3-point rubrics. This system could easily be used by SLPs to assess and monitor students’ development of life stories.
Coherence Dimensions
Chronology/Temporal Coherence Dimension
Can the person listening to the story infer the order in which the original actions within an event took place, either from the sequencing of these actions or from linguistic markers of temporality? Scoring chronology/temporal coherence:
0 = The narrative consists of a list of actions with minimal or no information about temporal order
1 = Naïve listener can place some but not most of the events on a timeline. Fewer than half of the temporally relevant actions can be ordered on a timeline with confidence
2 = Naïve listener can place between 50% and 75% of the relevant actions on a timeline but cannot reliably order the entire story from start to finish with confidence
3 = Naïve listener can order almost all (>75%) of the temporally relevant actions. This includes cases in which the speaker marks deviations from temporal order or repairs a violated timeline.
Given children’s early capabilities with temporal ordering, coherence with respect to chronology is the first to emerge in development. Even preschoolers are able to create a reasonably temporally ordered narrative, such as that represented as a “chronological” narrative in high-point analysis (Peterson & McCabe, 1983), but the ability to create a more complicated, causally connected narrative that would allow for the majority of actions to be presented in temporal order does not emerge until later childhood. Temporal coherence continues to develop into early adolescence because of the cognitive and linguistic demands of coordinating and marking the causal and temporal links of actions within an event.
Context Coherence Dimension
The context dimension provides information on where and when the event occurred. This information is necessary for the listener to make sense of the event description that follows:
0 = No information about time or location is provided
1 = Partial information is provided; there is mention of time or location at any level of specificity
2 = Both time and place mentioned, but only one dimension is specific
3 = Both time and place mentioned and both are specific.
Performance on this dimension does not emerge until middle childhood. Children’s understanding of time dimensions is developing during middle childhood and adolescence, especially their attempts to coordinate multiple time scales (months, years, seasons, school years) in reconstructing the times of personally experience events (Friedman, Reese, & Dai, 2009).
Theme Coherence Dimension
The NCCS theme category evaluates the degree to which the storyteller maintains and elaborates a topic or theme:
0 = The narrative is substantially off-topic and/or characterized by multiple digressions that make the topic difficult to identify. No attempt to repair digressions.
1 = A topic is identifiable, and most of the statements relate to it. The narrative may include minimal development of the topic through causal linkages, or personal evaluations and reactions, or elaborations of actions.
2 = The narrative substantially develops the topic. Several instances of causal linkages, and/or interpretations, and/or elaborations of previously reported actions are included.
3 = Narrative includes all the above and a resolution to the story, or links to other autobiographical experiences including future occurrences, or self-concept or identity. Resolution brings closure and provides new information.
By the end of the preschool years, children can generate, maintain, and elaborate on a topic (Peterson & McCabe, 1983), but the ability to provide a resolution or a connection between an event and the self does not emerge until adolescence (Habermas & de Silveira, 2008). Providing a resolution, or drawing a connection to the self, requires the additional abilities of being able to create overarching temporal links between a past event and the current state of affairs, as well as the ability to self-reflect and create explicit links between experience and self-understanding. These types of metacognitive skills do not emerge until early adolescence (e.g., Friedman, 2004; Harter, 1999). Thus, full development of the thematic dimension of coherence does not emerge until adolescence. Given that the ability to reflect upon the meaning and consequences of events continues to develop into young adulthood (Habermas & de Silveira, 2008), development on the thematic dimension of coherence continues over the life span.
Development of Narrative Coherences
Preschool children’s stories show only the seeds of coherence. They have some ability to stay on topic, but their provision of contextual information and their ability to order a narrative in chronological sequence are still limited. The strongest determinant of coherence at this age is the length of the narrative, with longer narratives being rated as more coherent on all three dimensions. Children’s expressive language skill also plays a role in their thematic coherence.
School-aged children’s narratives grow more coherent on all three dimensions into adolescence.
The most dramatic developmental change was evident in the chronology dimension, with more gradual changes for the context and theme dimensions. Compared with that of preschoolers, the coherence of school-aged children’s narratives becomes less a function of narrative length and language skill, and may vary as a function of the emotional valence of the event. When differences are found, negative events seem to be more coherently organized than positive events but only on some dimensions of coherence. School-aged children’s scores on the three dimensions of coherence were mostly independent, again suggesting that the three scales measure different aspects of coherence.
Adults’ narratives are highly coherent with respect to chronology and theme, and are only somewhat less coherent with respect to context. These three dimensions are independent indices of coherence by adulthood. Coherence is no longer a function of the length of the narrative for young adults.
Comments
The NCCS provides SLPs with a system for evaluating and monitoring the development of coherence in personal narratives. This coherence must first emerge in individual personal stories before it will be present in life stories. A goal for older students should be to develop coherent life stories.