Graduate School of Informatics /Cognitive Sciences

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Dilek Deniz Bilgiç will defend his thesis.

Title: PRESCHOOL CHILDREN’S STORY CONSTRUCTION AND USE OF DEIXIS IN FICTIONAL NARRATIVES

Date: 14th November 2018

Time: 10:00 AM

Place: A-108

Thesis Abstract : The Deictic Shift theory suggests that for interpreting an utterance, deictic terms must be used and one’s deictic center needs to be shifted with respect to the speaker’s. In the present study, Turkish preschool children’s fictional narratives are studied by examining the deictic terms they use to construct the story-world context within the theory of Deictic Shift and Deictic Center. For this goal, narratives elicited by a picture-based book by 47 preschool children between ages 3;6 and 6 are explored and compared to 23 adults’ narratives. Younger children used more demonstrative deictic terms, suggesting that they are tuned to the picture-book rather than the story context. They also used temporal deictics less frequently than adults, indicating that temporal deictics develop alongside the ability of plot organization. Overall, the results show that narrative development goes hand in hand with the development of how the expressions of the real-world context are shifted to the story-world context and the development of deictic expressions to convey psychological proximity.