Looking from the Inside: How Children Render Character’s Perspectives in Freely Told Fantasy Stories (2022)

Abstract: Story characters not only perform actions, they typically also perceive, feel, think, and communicate. Here we are interested in how children render characters’ perspectives when freely telling a fantasy story. Drawing on a sample of 150 narratives elicited from Dutch children aged 4-12, we provide an inventory of 750 instances of character-perspective representation (CPR), distinguishing fourteen different types. Firstly, we observe that character perspectives are ubiquitous in freely told children’s stories and take more varied forms than traditional frameworks can accommodate. Secondly, we discuss variation in the use of different types of CPR across age groups, finding that character perspectives are being fleshed out in more advanced and diverse ways as children grow older. Thirdly, we explore whether such variation can be meaningfully linked to automatically extracted linguistic features, thereby probing the potential for using automated tools from NLP to extract and classify character perspectives in children’s stories.

## introduction story characters are everywhere around us: we meet them in the books we read, the tv series we get caught up in, or in a gossipy tale we tell each other during everyday social gatherings. some characters may be modelled on real people, whereas others exist only in the imagined worlds of fantasy and fiction. in its most basic form, a story character is an entity involved in some kind of action or description. yet typically we also get to share in some of its perspectives on the storyworld and the objects, events, and other characters within it. there are long-standing traditions in linguistics and literary studies, especially within the subfields of sylistics and narratology, studying the ways in which such character perspectives can be rendered (e.g. @xcite @xcite . three main patterns commonly dis-tinguished in studies of 'speech and thought representation' are direct, indirect, and free-indirect speech or thought (see section 3 for examples). while most attention has been paid to literary texts, scholars have also identified such patterns in cinema @xcite , theatre @xcite , and other domains such as news articles @xcite , everyday conversations between parents and young infants @xcite , or speech from patients with psycho-pathological conditions @xcite . it is largely an open question as of yet how children render characters' intentions, perceptions, emotions, speech, and thought when asked to freely tell a fantasy story. this is worthwhile exploring for a variety of reasons. it has been widely argued that representing different perspectives reflects a central function of language usage (e.g. @xcite : human interaction is characterised by 'polyphony', meaning that we rarely only express our own perspective. instead, the default is that we use language to orchestrate multiple perspectives. even though this pervades all speech domains, stories are a key finding place for linguistic and narratological patterns supporting this function @xcite , and arguably also the 'sandbox' where both children and adults test and refine their perspective-orchestration skills @xcite . mapping how children of different ages render character perspectives is as such of interest to anguage acquisition research, but also to cognitive psychology as it provides insight into how children learn to understand the social world and others' minds, and the role narratives can play herein. tools from natural language processing (nlp) can fuel all such research, for example by automatically identifying contextual information associated with different character perspectives. nlp researchers, in turn, can learn about phenomena relevant for embarking on tasks involving more complex classification or extraction of perspectivised content. in the current contribution we draw on a sample of 150 stories, told by children aged 4-12 as part of storytelling workshops we offered across the netherlands. our sample features 750 instances of character-perspective representation (cpr), which we categorise in fourteen different types based on manual qualitative analysis. as discussed below, the type categories and analytical framework we adopt are primarily inspired on 'classic' str literature (mainly @xcite . however, we complement our framework with additional types based on research into children's development as storytellers and relevant insights from cognitive linguistics, allowing for a more refined and inclusive way of mapping character perspectives. the best way to introduce our approach in concrete terms is to discuss the analysis of an example story. doing so will also make clear how we position this paper: as an effort to build a bridge between qualitative analysis of narrative material as traditionally done in the humanities, and quantitative analysis, driven by the automatic extraction of linguistic information, as customary in computational approaches. in 2.1-2.4 below we first provide more details on our corpus, sample, and annotations. in 2.5 we introduce two automatically extracted linguistic variables, lexical and syntactic complexity, and in 2.6 our aims and hypotheses are formulated. section 3 opens with the discussion of the example story, followed by an inventory of all instances of cpr we have identified in our sample, classified in fourteen types. we explore how the occurrence of different types of perspective representation varies with the age of the storytellers in 4.1, and with lexical and syntactic characteristics of the utterances in which they occur in 4.2. ## types, inventory, and staging of cpr in order to illustrate our approach in more detail, we will now discuss the analysis of a story excerpt, featuring five types of cpr found throughout our sample. afterwards, the remaining types will be briefly introduced along with a complete overview with examples and counts in in utterance 1 we learn about the animals she 'saw'. it could be defended that this is still entirely the narrator's voice telling us 'from the outside' what the girl would have been seeing at the zoo. yet, as discussed in 2.4 above, and in line with what cognitive linguists have argued in recent years (e.g. van duijn and verhagen, 2018), we suggest that perspectivisation of content in narratives can be seen on a cline ranging from pure narrator view on the one extreme, to full character view with minimal narrator mediation on the other extreme. following this approach, the report of what the girl 'saw' in utterance 1 implies a modest but certain invitation for listeners or readers of the story to imagine the girl's perspective on objects within the storyworld: 'a huge lot of tigers and other animals'. this is a case of character perception (per) in our system of types. another instance is found in utterance 6. what is more, we note a difference between how the situation of the 'little brother' is described ('was left behind', 'sitting on a monkey', utterance 3) and some of the descriptions of actions performed by the 'girl' (e.g. 'went home all alone', utterance 2; 'went back again to the zoo', utterance 5). following developmental psychologists and children's story researchers @xcite we classify the latter as cases of intention-in-action (iia), i.e. actions coupled to a clear goal or result within the immediate story context. compared to per and other forms of cpr discussed below, iia represents the lowest degree of inviting a shift from the narrator's to a character's perspective. yet mere descriptions of a character's situation, appearance, attributes, or actions without an immediately specified result or goal do not invite such a shift at all, or to an even lesser degree. this is why we see iia as the most basic type in our staging of perspective representation. in utterance 4 we find a case of direct speech (ds) with an inquit formula ('said the sister of the little boy') and a reported clause ('where is my little brother now' foot_5 ). the reported clause has three features supporting our classification as ds. firstly, a shift to the present tense can be observed ('is' as opposed to 'said' in the inquit formula). secondly, there is a shift from the third to the first person as expressed by the pronoun 'my'. and thirdly, the addition of 'now' ('nou' in the original dutch story) can be seen as an idiomatic exclamation, expressing a degree of wonder or confusion (which is not satisfactory covered by the english translation 'now'). this wonder or confusion is clearly to be interpreted as part of the 'girl'-character's experience, and not of the narrator's, just as 'my little brother' from the character's point of view indicates the same referent as 'the little boy' from the narrator's point of view. the present tense is congruent with the girl-character's experience at the moment of speaking within the story plot. finally, utterance 7 features free direct speech (fds). here we see the same shift to present tense ('are') and the same exclamation ('nou' in the dutch original), complemented with another exclamation at the beginning of the sentence ('oh'). the absence of an inquit formula makes it a case of fds rather than ds. or, a different possible interpretation of utterance 7 is that we are looking at a form of 'monologue intérieur' in which the girl-character produces this utterance for herself, in looking at frequencies in the representation of speech and thought, it is apparent that ds is the most used type of speech representation (74 occurrences), whereas the much more indirect nrms is most frequent (98) in representing thought. finally, the type viewpoint package (vp), recorded 44 times, is introduced by us based on recent work (van duijn and verhagen, 2018) that we found useful in our children's story context. in short, viewpoint packages are single words implying a mental state contrasting with a state of affairs or with another mental state. for example, if a character does something 'secretly', this implies that there is a perspective from which this is not noticed and a perspective from it is indeed desired that it remains unnoticed. we follow @xcite in their analysis suggesting that, for a storyteller, iia and per require less advanced efforts on a cognitive level, compared to handling character speech representation. dealing with character thought, in turn, is argued to be more advanced on a cognitive level than handling speech, for exactly the reason discussed in the preceding paragraph: thought representation requires the narrator to intrude into character minds, whereas speech representation does not. following this analysis, plus our own analysis of ego-narration in 2.4, the order in which we present the fourteen types in ## reflection and conclusion our inventory shows that cpr is ubiquitous in freely told children's stories and that it takes many different forms. we discussed that classification of perspective phenomena into a system of cpr types requires knowledge of linguistic and narratological theory, and that it is regularly dependent on thorough analysis of an utterance's context within a story. reliance on a single annotator is a weakness of this study; however, we believe to have satisfied our goal of building a meaningful (foundation of a) bridge between long-standing research traditions in the humanities and current approaches in the computational sciences. regarding ego narration we have identified cases exhibiting a problematic mixing between children's own perspective and the narrator's or characters' perspectives in the story, and argued for seeing these as a preliminary stage of cpr. also, building on existing work from developmental psychology and cognitive linguistics, we have introduced the types iia, per, and vp in our analysis, covering perspectives implied in actions, perceptions, and single lexical units such as 'secretly'. this was particularly useful for getting a grasp on the more basic stages of perspective coordination as present in our sample of children's stories. although we did not see occurrence of these basic stages peak at younger ages, as we expected, we presented evidence that indeed more complex types are implemented more frequently at later ages. furthermore, our aim was to link automatically extracted linguistic information to the occurrence of different types of cpr, while also taking age differences into account. the picture that emerged for lexical and syntactic complexity was more complicated than we anticipated. by taking into account dependency of utterances coming from the same speaker by using random intercepts, and by including interactions with age in our statistical models, we tried to describe as much variation as possible in the language children use when rendering character perspectives. as we saw, overall average differences in lexical and syntactic complexity between ages were small at the outset, and we were not able to link higher linguistic complexity to advanced types of cpr. here the overall sparse occurrence of several of the individual types likely calls for exploiting a larger part of our story database in the future. we also learned that using perplexity and tree depth to describe the immediate (utterance-level) contexts in which cpr patterns occur, is challenging, suggesting that additional types of linguistic information from wider (story-level) contexts could be needed. all in all, these findings and lessons encourage us to pursue the line of inquiry set out in this paper. this will also require refining our framework, models, and automatically extracted information in interaction with linguistic and narratological theory, for which additional interdisciplinary cooperation is indispensable.