On how changes in the communicative situation affect the macrostructure of picture-based narratives by adults

This talk focuses on macrostructural characteristics in picture-based stories told by adults in an experimental setting. It explores how changes in the communicative situation, focusing mainly on the addressee, affect the macrostructure of their narratives. Using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), narratives were elicited from 60 mono- lingual adult Russian, Polish, and German speakers (aged 20-25 years). The participants met online with an interviewer and were asked to tell two stories (Baby Birds and Baby Goats) per person. The first story should be told to the interviewer, who could not see the pictures himself; for the second story, the communication situation changed: It should be told to an imaginary child, who is also expected to not see the pictures. Con- sidering the theoretical implications of changing the communicative and, therefore, narrative situation in an experimental setting, the narratives were analyzed for differences at the macrostructural level, compared with existing studies on MAIN stories with adults, and the effects of changing the communication situation are to be worked out. The results indicate that the change clearly affects the narratives: narratives addressed to an imaginary child score higher on the macrostructural level and contain more narrative elements. The factor did not affect single categories of macrostructural components but led to a general - in most cases significant - increase. The findings provide a basis for claiming that modifications in the task of telling picture-based stories, here, changing the communicative situation, has an impact on the way adults tell their stories and can lead to more descriptive or, on the contrary, more narrative data.