3.2. Elicitation of Narratives

The evidence obtained from the analysis of novels and translations  holds the shortcoming that novels and translations reflect creative written literary language. Translations pose the additional handicap of having been produced by individuals who are experts in the two languages and who have to respect what is written in the source. This leads to interferences between the languages and to constraints on the forms used. Thus, a paradox arises: novels become incommensurable because of the creative freedom of literary authors, while the constraints imposed on translators make translations also not a very good standard for comparison. Both reflect highly elaborate registers of written discourse which might not be a reliable indicator of what happens in the language at large.

Slobin and some of his collaborators have used an experimental setting that overcomes these shortcomings. They have collected narratives based on the same wordless story from speakers of several languages. They presented the story to their subjects by means of a book that told it with 25 pictures. It portrays a boy and his dog trying to find the boy’s pet frog that has escaped during the night. There are many directed motion events. The subjects involved were pre-school children of 3, 4 and 5 years of age, school children of 9, and adults. Stories from twelve subjects in each age group for a total of 60 stories in each language were collected and analyzed. The languages involved were English, German, Spanish, Turkish and Hebrew. Two of them were satellite-framed (the Germanic languages), while the other three, verb-framed.

The advantage of this experimental setting is that it involves everyday oral language in a very constrained situation which ensures that all the subjects across languages and ages are referring to the same reality, the "frog" story. This allows for crosslinguistic and developmental comparison of the forms and functions used in the narratives (see Berman and Slobin 1994 for a description of the whole project and its findings).