Joan Lucariello

Remembering and Planning: Talk between Mothers and Children.

Three aspects of temporally displaced (TD) talk between mothers and children were explored: the role of the knowledge base in such talk, the effect of mother talk on child talk, and the impact of such talk on the childs knowledge base. Mother‐child (2‐year‐old) speech was observed in three contexts: (a) routine or scripted; (b) free play; and (c) novel play. Such talk occurred almost exclusively in the scripted context and its topics were predominantly based on other routine activities in which the dyad was not presently engaged. These results point to the strong influence of the knowledge base in terms of event schemas (representations of routine activities) in supporting TD talk. Maternal talk was characterized by the use of adverbial temporal markers, hypothetical and conditional expressions, conversational routines, and Wh‐ questions. These aspects of maternal speech indicate “scaffolding” and may facilitate the childs acquisition of the appropriate form, content, and organization of TD talk. Analys...

Context Effects on Lexical Specificity in Maternal and Child Discourse.

Mother–child (two-year-old) object labelling was studied in three natural discourse settings: (1) routine, caretaking; (2) free play; and (3) novel. Object labelling was found to be considerably more varied in these natural discourse settings than in experimental situations. While basic level tokens predominated in the free play context, they were significantly less prevalent in the routine and novel contexts. Additionally, subordinate level term usage was more common in the routine and novel contexts. The relation between mother and child labelling was also investigated and results indicated that context may be more important in determining level of labels than maternal modelling. Analyses of the discourse uses of non-basic level terms revealed that mothers were organizing the social-interactive context in ways that may facilitate child category formation.

Mind, Culture, Person: Elements in a Cultural Psychology

From the 1960s to the present, four distinct cultural psychologies have evolved. The ‘mind and culture’ account, typifying research until the 1970s, treated culture and cognition as separable. Mind was regarded as a set of logical-scientific, abstract cognitive abilities, and the effect of cultural variables such as schooling on these abilities was examined. Subsequent cultural psychologies came to treat mind and culture as inseparable. The ‘mind in culture’ account, evidenced in the cultural practice/activity view, redefines culture as practices. Cognition and culture interact in practices. However, traditional cognitive abilities still represent the analytic units, and the relation between these abilities and cultural practices is examined. According to a third, ‘culture in mind’ account, evidenced in the study of narrative thinking, a cultural category – narrative – is intrinsic to mind. Narrative becomes a new analytic unit. Finally in ‘person-based’ cultural psychology, the intentional agent is incorporated into cultural and cognitive functioning. Persons interpret, and hence construct, culture through deploying stances – meaningful frames by which persons construe reality. These stances become the analytic units, providing a multiplicity of meaningful cognitive categories. The core developmental issue becomes the emergence of person.

The Development of Complex Metarepresentational Reasoning: The Case of Situational Irony.

Abstract Situational irony requires the representation of events that end contrary to expectation, as if in mockery of the fitness of things. It entails metarepresentational reasoning because event representations must be manipulated to recognize and construct ironic events. Ironic ability in 6-and 8-year-olds was tested in a story-completion task. Story stems based on a familiar event, for which a structured, detailed representation is available, were more facilitative of irony at both ages than stems based on a less familiar activity for which no such representation is available. These data support the idea that irony is a metarepresentational skill. Younger childrens irony was restricted to ironic forms that entail cognitively simpler representational manipulations, whereas older childrens irony included complex forms. Irony was not easily accomplished at either age, however, suggesting that this metarepresentational skill is more difficult than those theory-of-mind behaviors typical of 5-to 8-year-olds. The relation of Situational irony to consciousness and the self is discussed.

Spinning fantasy: themes, structure, and the knowledge base.

The influence of the childs knowledge base, in terms of event schemas, on symbolic play behavior was investigated. The pretend play behavior of 10 mother-child (2-0 to 2-4) dyads was observed in 2 play contexts. Play was examined for thematic content and the following structural components: self-other relations, substitute/imaginary objects, action integration, and planfulness. The highest levels of symbolic play behavior emerged in pretense episodes whose thematic content was event based. Additionally, thematic content affected the respective roles of mother and child in the construction of pretense. In pretense activity based on themes with which the child was familiar (e.g., routine events), the child, as well as the mother, participated in advanced levels of symbolic play activity, coconstructing pretense. In pretense based on themes unfamiliar to the child, the mother was almost exclusively responsible for the pretense. Thus, the development of child symbolic play appears to be related to the knowledge base in that its emergence is domain-specific--limited to themes for which the child has knowledge--before being more widely manifested.

The Best Laid Plans ... : Beyond Scripts are Counterscripts

This study examined whether counterscripts (general, semantic knowledge structures for unexpected events exhibiting definable, common event structure) are part of our event knowledge. Classic among counterscript events are situationally ironic ones (e.g., an agents goal-directed actions yield the opposite outcome or are superseded by fluke actions in securing a goal). In a category ratings task, adults rated 3 event kinds for ironic status: script (expected, routine events associated with general knowledge structures), counterscript ironic, and anomaly-unexpected (unexpected events with no common structure and not associated with general knowledge structures). The data indicate that general, semantic knowledge structures exist for counterscript ironic events. These events were rated in the ironic range and more ironic than script and anomaly-unexpected events. Script events were rated least ironic. Script and counterscript events emerged as independent event factors. Moreover, counterscript ironic events exhibited internal structure (degree of irony varied across event kinds), a component of conceptual coherence.

‘Macro-Cultural Psychology’ Is Only Part of the Story: The Necessity to Understand the Interaction between Culture and Other Influences in Behavior

In his new book Cultural Psychology: A Perspective on Psychological Functioning and Social Reform, Carl Ratner states that he is introducing a paradigm shift in psychology with his theory ‘macro-cultural psychology.’ He claims this ‘radical reconceptualization’ on the basis of at least two aspects of his theory: the definition of culture as macro-cultural factors (let us refer to them as MCFs) and the relation between psychology and social reform. The theory does contribute to psychology in these respects. However, in many other ways, this theory is cultural psychology as usual. A more significant weakness of Ratner’s macro-cultural psychology is its isolationist stance. Human behavior is understood only in relation to MCFs. Moreover, human behavior is thought to be best studied only through qualitative methods. This narrow lens does not move cultural psychology to where it needs to be today and leaves it a far less powerful tool for understanding and changing human behavior. First, what are MCFs? These are factors that affect many people. They are divided into three kinds: (1) institutions and policies , such as governments, corporations, families, schools, economic enterprises, spiritual organizations, and health care systems, (2) physical infrastructure and artifacts, such as buildings, highways, advertisements, textbooks, art, tools/utensils, and clothing, and (3) cultural concepts, which include religious doctrines and concepts about time, morality, sex, and personhood. A focus on this sweep of factors is unusual in psychology in general and cultural psychology in particular. More common is a focus on a subset of these. Hence, a view of all, and interpreting culture as a reality of these MCFs, are significant conceptual advances.