Abstract:

The parent-child autobiographical narrative plays a crucial role during children`s childhood. It can be defined as the activity which mothers and children recall and talk past experience with each other. Maternal verbal scaffolding, which can also be understood as mothers’ discourse, can provide leading help in the process of parent-child autobiographical narrative. Mothers often paly the very beginning role of storyteller and would offer help during children`s talking. Children learn to organize and construct their own narrative gradually through imitating mother’s language. Maternal verbal scaffolding may encourage and motivate children to behave actively in the process of narrative. It is quite significant to the development of children’s language, cognition and social emotion. The current paper mainly reviews the style of maternal verbal scaffolding and specifies its influence in terms of specific emotional events in parent-child autobiographical narrative. In addition, it provides the differences which may vary in gender and social culture of maternal verbal scaffolding. Besides, it shows the unique characteristics of disabled children. Finally, this paper intends to offer recommendations for the future research. Researchers suggested that elaborative level is a critical dimension of the style of maternal verbal scaffolding. Mothers with high elaborative style talk frequently about past, and engage in long and detailed conversations about what has happened. Mothers with low elaborative style, in contrast, do not talk about the past frequently and when they do, they tend to ask few and redundant questions. Researches indicated that mothers who engage in highly elaborative reminiscing have children who develop better memory, narrative and cognition. The elaborative style can be further separated into two independent components: maternal structure and autonomy support. They both have important impacts on the level of maternal verbal scaffolding. This article also discusses the influence of maternal verbal scaffolding on children’s narrative in the specific emotional events. The specific emotional events require parents to recall positive or negative events. There may be different underlying goals when reminiscing about positive vs. negative experience. When mothers and children reminisce about positive events, it makes sense that mothers may try to create a shared emotional history with their children. In contrast, when discussing negative experiences, mothers may have the goals of helping their children to understand and resolve negative effects. Although this field has made many achievements, researches in this area can be further strengthened. The first major area is about the influence factor of maternal verbal scaffolding. How maternal reminiscing style is linked to mothers’ personality, self-concept and some factors of children can be further studied. Besides, future research should investigate how mothers’ reminiscing goal can affect maternal reminiscing style. Mothers of different reminiscing goals may vary in their language. In addition, Future studies need to explore how the maternal verbal scaffolding change with the development of children’s memory and understanding level. Finally, we need to broaden the research beyond mother-child conversations about everyday shared past events. Children’s reminiscing partner can be extended to father, grandparents, aunts and uncles, teachers, siblings, and peers. Besides, how the family as a whole reminisces about their past is an intriguing question and is worthy to be furthered studies.

摘要：

亲子自传叙事中母亲的语言支架指母亲在对过去事件进行回忆和交流的过程中给儿童提供的引导性语言。母亲语言支架的风格分为高详尽和低详尽两个水平，高详尽的语言风格更能促进儿童语言、认知和社会情感的发展。在特定情绪性事件中，母亲的语言支架对儿童社会性的发展也有十分重要的影响。此外，亲子自传叙事中母亲的语言支架还存在性别和社会文化差异，且在特殊儿童身上表现出不同的特点。未来应加强对母亲语言支架的影响因素以及母亲回忆目标对语言支架的影响等问题的探讨。