Frog, where are you? Children's narrative expression over the telephone

Abstract

Many researchers believe that the use of distanced language is at the core of the transition to literacy and that reading and writing are consummate acts of this distancing, or decontextualization. Talking on the telephone offers an ecologically valid intermediate context to ascertain developmental components of such metacommunicative awareness as the need to be clear to communicative partners to compensate for their physical distance. Children's telephone communications demonstrate how they recon‐textualize language to be better understood. Sixty 4‐, 6‐, and 8‐year‐olds told stories from the wordless picture book, Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969), to a present communicative partner and to that same individual over the telephone. Children from age 4 onward created different narratives over the telephone from face‐to‐face in length, narrativity, revision, and goal‐related events. Research on the effects of telephone experience could enhance understanding of the effects of such metalinguistic phenomena on early literacy development.