In sand stories, an Indigenous narrative practice from Central Australia, semi-conventionalized graphic symbols drawn on the ground are interwoven with speech, sign and gesture. This article examines some aspects of the complexity seen in this dynamic graphic tradition, illustrating the ways that these different semiotic resources work together to create complex multimodal utterances. The complexity of sand stories provides an almost unique platform from which to investigate the rich diversity of the expressive dimensions of narrative and demonstrates what needs to be taken into account if we are to make meaningful comparisons of storytelling practices in a range of cultures and contexts.

The purpose of this study is to explore the link between autobiographical memories and personal narratives and to assess whether the emotions present in memories are maintained or transformed when memories are narrated. In a Memory Fluency Task a total of 72 Italian undergraduates (35 males and 37 females) were asked to recall memories from their last period of life (from adolescence to present), to select one of them and to choose the emotions connected to this memory from an eleven-item list. Then, they were requested to write this memory in detail and again to select the emotions connected to the narrative from the same list of emotions. The emotions were distinguished as simple positive, simple negative, simple neutral, and complex (positive and negative). The results showed, on the whole, that participants expressed more emotions and a greater number of complex emotions in narratives than in memories. The authors interpret these results using a Vygotskyan frame of reference and considering the narratives as a form of external speech that makes memories more explicit.

Narrative researchers are faced with the challenges of ethically co-constructing human data and writing meaningful, readable research texts, which protect participants’ anonymity. This article adds to the conversation of qualitative, and especially narrative, inquiry by presenting one creative approach to these challenges. It proposes that using extended literary metaphor and known literary characters, as analytical and structural tools, develops allegoric layers of meaning while preserving participant anonymity. Situating narrative research in the realm of imaginative story may help readers and researchers, like Alice in her Wonderland adventures, return from their journey through the research storyworld portal with new insights, and heightened understandings, of those phenomena being revealed and illuminated through narrative.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the relationships between “the oral” and “the written” in a particular application of narrative research (life rendering research). First, we examine a functional and valuing contrast between oral and written language within oral history methods. Second, we present a critical examination of the use of these linguistic predispositions as they impact life history narratives. Next, we examine a particularly close analogy between oral history and psychiatric patient write-up. Finally, the historical oral/written tension located in oral history practice is located within the frameworks of newer, media-based literacies. The tensions that these intentions create are particularly acute in power-based relationships, such as those between interviewers and informants. Therefore, the organization of the paper is a series of issues that combine to form a critical look at the use of informants’ words in the written narratives of the oral history as a form of discourse synthesis (Spivey, 1997).

Clinicians often wonder if the single sentence from the Folstein Mini-Mental Status Exam (MMSE) offers meaningful information about the patient. We compared single sentences derived from the MMSE generated by 3 groups of participants — hospitalized medically-ill patients with psychiatric comorbidity, hospitalized medically-ill patients without psychiatric comorbidity, and non-hospitalized non-psychiatric participants. These sentences were analyzed for themes using manual thematic coding and a semi-automatic computerized method, the Meaning Extraction Method (MEM). We found that thematic content obtained from as little as a single sentence could differentiate between participant groups using both methods. Specifically, psychiatric patients used more power themes, focused on states other than the present, and were less interpersonally engaged than the other groups. Thematic content also indicated cognitive status through scores on the Clock Drawing Test (CDT) and MMSE. Our findings suggest that a single sentence can provide meaningful information about patients with medical and psychiatric comorbidity.

Studies of monolingual narrative production have revealed interacting paths in the development of coherence and cohesion across languages but less is known about bilingual narratives, where a gap may exist between socio-cognitive and linguistic abilities. The present longitudinal study explores the relations between measures of coherence and cohesion in the picture-based oral narratives elicited from 23 sequential bilinguals at two times — 2nd and 4th years of exposure to Hebrew as L2 (ages 6 and 8, respectively), compared to those produced by age-matched Hebrew speaking monolinguals. Measures of coherence included reference to story components, and to four types of causal relations: psychological, motivational, enabling and physical. These analyses served as a basis to explore cohesion in terms of (1) inter-clausal connectivity, and (2) the linguistic encoding of the causal chain, which in this context demanded reference to a complex motion event. We found that reference to narrative components and causal relations improved with age in both L1 and L2, but were largely delayed among bilinguals at age 6, particularly regarding the most complex scenes. While coherence measures reached to a parallel level among the 8 year-old children, measures of cohesion showed a different path of development in L1 and L2. Thus, the constraints imposed by language use in organizing the discourse resulted in a poorer connectivity between the clauses, and in less accurate lexico-grammatical encoding of the events in the bilingual narratives. The study underscores the mutual attraction between local and global principles of narrative construction, which may become dissociated in a bilingual situation, and pinpoints to vulnerable domains of L2 discourse-embedded acquisition.

Studies on clients’ language processes in psychotherapy have focused on specific non-narrative aspects rather than on narrative processes. This study’s goal was to test the commonalities and differences between a group of narratives from 15 depressed patients and 14 anxious patients. Patients’ narratives were obtained through self-characterizations written by the client and, were analyzed by means of the Narrative Assessment Grid — a combination of narrative analysis dimensions. Results indicated that both groups could be distinguished by six of the 22 dimensions assessed: (a) Variety of characters, (b) Objectifying, (c) Intelligibility/Clarity, (d) Cognitive Subjectifying, (e) Metaphorizing; and (f) Intelligibility/Stability. Clinical implications of our results are discussed.

In the present article, I explore how urban youth use narrating for self-presentation as they relate to diverse contexts and audiences. Diverse narrative genres employed in this study were used as a socio-cognitive tool for looking into enactments ofrelational complexity— a skill of adjusting one’s communications to audiences and contexts. Thirteen adolescents were asked to narrate about the most important aspects of their lives, using two different genres and addressing two different audiences. I explored youth’s systematically varied use of psychological state expressions, as they navigated through different genres and audiences. As adolescents narrate either about the negative experiences or for the imagined peer audience, their narrating involves more cognitive than affective expressions. This indicates that systematic changes take place in narrating as a socio-cognitive process when there is a need for more intense work around issues, either to figure out what is happening, or to try to present oneself in the best light to salient others.