The Use of Picture Stories in the Investigation of Crosslinguistic Influence

The Use of Picture Stories in the Investigation of Crosslinguistic Influence LAURA SANCHEZ University of Barcelona Barcelona, Spain SCOTT JARVIS Ohio University Athens, Ohio, United Stat

The Use of Picture Stories in the Investigation of Crosslinguistic Influence

LAURA SANCHEZ

University of Barcelona

Barcelona, Spain

SCOTT JARVIS

Ohio University

Athens, Ohio, United States

䡲 One remarkable fact about the use of visual prompts in L2 research is that the characteristics that can make a picture story inappropriate for certain purposes can make that same picture story quite useful for other purposes This is what we have found regarding our use of picture stories (and also films) in investigations of crosslinguistic and cross-cultural influences on L2 acquisition and use From the perspective of the 33 criteria proposed by Rossiter, Derwing, and Jones (this issue) for select-ing and creatselect-ing effective picture stories for L2 research, we have found that picture stories that, at first glance, may be interpreted as violating

Criterion 4 (“Does each panel have a single event?”) and Criterion 28 (“Are actions clear?”), in particular, are sometimes quite useful for in-vestigating crosslinguistic effects These images are useful because the objects and events depicted in visual stimuli are often mentally catego-rized, conceptualized, and recalled in different ways by learners from different native-language backgrounds

A picture story that we have found useful for these purposes is infor-mally known as “The Dog Story.” This picture story was adapted from Heaton (1966) and has been used in the battery of tests in the Barcelona Age Factor project.1The picture series comprises six panels, and the plot

of “The Dog Story” is as follows:

There are two main protagonists, a boy and a girl, who are getting ready for a picnic; a secondary character, their mother; and a character that disappears and later reappears, a dog that gets into the food basket and eats the children’s sandwiches (Muñoz, 2006, p 21)

The panels that we focused on in Sanchez and Jarvis (2006) were the first two, where (a) a mother is shown pouring a beverage into a thermos (for her children, who are shown in the foreground preparing a picnic bas-ket), and (b) a dog is shown getting ready to climb or jump into the picnic basket while the children’s backs are turned We think that both

of these pictures may violate Criterion 28 (“Are actions clear?”) because

we found that we, ourselves, differ in how we interpret what the pictures show Yet, it is precisely this fact that made the results of our study so interesting We found that whereas native English speakers tend to de-scribe the two events as involving specific types of directional motion (e.g., “pouring milk into a thermos,” “jumping into the basket”), native Spanish speakers and Catalan-Spanish learners of English tend to de-scribe the two events as actions whose manners are nondescript but which bring about a change of location (e.g., “putting tea in a bottle,”

“putting himself in a basket”)

Related findings have come from studies that have used a picture story known informally as “The Frog Story,” which is a wordless picture book

titled Frog, Where are You? (Mayer, 1969) A series of studies published in

Berman and Slobin (1994) used this picture story with children from several different language backgrounds, and the results of the studies suggest that speakers of different languages differ with respect to how tightly they verbally represent various events For example, when describ-ing a particular series of three consecutive panels in “The Frog Story,” speakers of English and German tend to refer to only one or two actions,

1 This project is coordinated by Carmen Muñoz, and has been possible thanks to three grants by the Ministry of Education and Science and the Catalan Ministry of Education (BFF2001-3384, PB97-0901 and HUM 2004-05167).

but speakers of Spanish and Hebrew tend to segment the same episode into three separate actions (see pp 11–12) Subsequent work by Keller-man (2001) and Vermeulen and KellerKeller-man (1999) has suggested that these and related L1-based tendencies often transfer into a learner’s use

of an L2 Accordingly, what determines whether a panel depicts a single event (cf Rossiter et al.’s Criterion 4) may depend on the learner’s native language and cultural background, but it is precisely this condi-tion that makes these types of picture stories so interesting for research

on crosslinguistic influence

Picture perception involves a special ability to interpret (a) “features

of pictures that are not found in non-pictorial objects” and (b) the implications of details that have been left out of those pictures (Kennedy, 1976, p 220) Because pictures are not exact representations

of real-world objects and events, viewers do not merely perceive but also conceptualize (i.e., mentally construe) what a picture represents, and the fewer the details a picture provides, the more those details must be supplied by the person’s own conceptualization (cf Domander, 1978, p 296) Researchers who are interested in crosslinguistic influence at the level of conceptualization often intentionally select or create pictures in which certain details are missing to investigate whether or how learners from different language backgrounds fill in missing information The studies mentioned earlier using “The Dog Story” and “The Frog Story” have certainly used this approach Perhaps an even clearer example can

be found in the work of von Stutterheim and colleagues (e.g., von Stut-terheim, 2003; von Stutterheim & Nüse, 2003), who used film clips that omit the end points of events to leave something to learners’ imagina-tion Their decision to use film clips instead of picture stories was prob-ably driven largely by their need to make the nature of the depicted action (e.g., walking versus standing or running) very clear to the learn-ers so that they could control the types of variables that might affect their reference to end points The decision to use a film versus a picture story thus depends heavily on the specific focus of one’s study, and one could also say the same thing about the choice between a picture story and a single picture Von Stutterheim (2003) implies that picture stories may

be better for the investigation of learners’ construal of event-time struc-tures, whereas single descriptive pictures may be better suited to the investigation of their conceptualization of spatial relationships

We wish to emphasize the importance of having the same picture series (or the same film) used in multiple studies conducted by multiple different researchers Even though it would not make sense for all studies

of L2 acquisition that use picture stories to use the same set of pictures,

it also would not make sense for every study to use a different set That would lead to a condition where no two studies would be comparable and where, consequently, no study’s findings could be either confidently

confirmed or rejected by later studies Fortunately, many of the picture stories that have been used by researchers in our field for data elicitation purposes have been used in multiple studies by many different research-ers “The Dog Story” is a good case in point Narratives elicited using

“The Dog Story” form an important part of the Barcelona English Lan-guage Corpus,2 and data elicited with this picture story have been used

in investigations of morphosyntactic accuracy orders, the development

of oral fluency and interactional skills, the use of discursive elements in narrative development (see the different contributions in Muñoz, 2006), and various types of crosslinguistic influence involving more than one target language (e.g., Sanchez 2006; Sanchez & Jarvis, 2006) Not only does the use of the same picture series in multiple studies facilitate the cross-comparison of results, but it also has the added benefit of estab-lishing the validity and reliability of the picture series (or film) as a research tool

THE AUTHORS

Laura Sanchez is a lecturer at the University of Barcelona, Spain, where she teaches courses on descriptive grammar and applied linguistics She is also a member of the Barcelona Age Factor project and conducts research on crosslinguistic influence in the acquisition of L4 English by EFL Spanish/Catalan learners with L3 German Scott Jarvis is an associate professor of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, United States, where he teaches courses related to L2 acquisition and language assessment His primary research emphases include cross-linguistic influence and the measurement of lexical diversity.

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