The roots of narrative: Discussing recent events with very young children

Discussions of recent events (DREs) by mother-infant dyads were investigated. Three groups of Hebrew-speaking subjects were videotaped when the infants were 10, 18 and 26 months old. Mothers focused on a small set of events to comment on, e.g. the transformation of an object, the children's falling, or the completion of an action. They tended to mark a recent event by an exclamation or a formulaic expression when the children were very young, gradually switching to true descriptions of events with the older children. Children did not adopt exclamations for marking recent events, preferring true lexical items which they used in short formulaic expressions. DREs are important contexts for highlighting noteworthy events in the flow of experience, and for facilitating the acquisition of some of the means for discussing events, e.g. verbs in the past tense. However, this context is less adequate for the learning of the establishment of the topic of a narrative, independent of the present situation.