Telling the unknown story complex and explicit narration by African American preadolescents - Preliminary examination of gender and socioeconomic issues

This article investigates the oral personal narration of 16 African American children, 8 males and 8 females. Half of the 16 children were from a low socioeconomic status (SES) and half from a middle SES background. Narratives were analyzed using dependency analysis and yielded the following measures: fully implicit propositions, partially implicit propositions, explicit propositions, repeated propositions, internal corrections, and false starts, the highest level of proposition, and reported speech. There was a main effect of gender and SES on the highest level of proposition articulated. Girls achieved a significantly higher level of proposition than did boys, indicating a tendency to greater elaboration in their discourses. Of greatest interest was the finding that low SES children achieved a significantly higher level of proposition than did middle SES children.