Discursive designing of autobiographical memories in speech ontogeny: Longitudinal survey

Autobiographical memories have been investigated, experimentally rather than in real interactional settings. This study explores the role of language in mental processes through the linguistic explication of memories in discursive practices in early ontogenesis. It considers the ways and means of early oral memories evolvement in the interdisciplinary paradigm. The goal is to identify the mechanism of early discourse formation in recalls. The data were collected from the multimedia corpus CHILDES Transcript Browser with speech transcripts of German-speaking children from three to seven years old and were subjected to communicative, pragmatic, cognitive and discursive analyses. Adults’ verbal discursive strategies and tactics were examined to explicate the mnemonic content of children’s narratives. We identified the pragmatic orientation of stimulating statements of adults and described the linguistic features of a child’s mnemonic utterances. It has been found that the main discursive strategies of adults prompting children are: the strategy of discursive socialization, the strategy of dialogic narrative with its further transformation into a mnemonic narrative and information extraction from memory. As a result, the psycholinguistic (verbal) model of the ontogenetic generalization of childhood memories typical for German-speaking communication partners was developed. The model includes six stages according to the age of a preschooler. It displays the evolution of the surface structure of mnemonic utterances-recollections, which make up the framework of primary autobiographical narrations. This research fills in the niches in discourse studies, in ontogenesis and in the primary and secondary text models. The findings may have practical application in corpus and empirical studies.