The stability of narrative and paradigmatic framing of mother-child communication within and across tasks

The purpose of this study was to examine three assumptions of Nelson's (1993) theoretical perspective concerning relationships between narrative and paradigmatic mother-child communication and children's cognitive development. These assumptions were: 1) that there are distinct narrative and paradigmatic styles of communication, 2) that mothers show stability in their use of narrative and paradigmatic communication with their young children, within and across contexts, and 3) that children, as an apparent result of internalization, show stability in their use of the form of communication predominantly used by their mothers, both within and across contexts. Four mother-child conversational tasks were used: a descriptive picturebook task, a memory picturebook task, a task in which children recalled the content of the memory picturebook with the help of their mothers, and an autobiographical memory task. In addition, two experimenter-child tasks were used: a descriptive picturebook task and a scripted memory task