How early adolescents describe their dreams: a quantitative analysis.
Most empirical research on dreams has focused on content and structure, while linguistic features have received far less attention. The present study investigated dream language in a critical developmental stage: early adolescence. Narratives of the dreams of 145 early adolescents were tape-recorded and transcribed, and the frequencies of various grammar forms and common words were calculated. The most common nouns for the entire sample were house and mother. The most frequent verbs were go and do. Males' dream narratives contained a greater number of such words as animal, long, enter, and kill. Females more often used intransitive verbs and such words as teacher, horse, and put. Several features differentiated older from younger early adolescents' dreams. The results indicate that linguistic features of dream narratives are affected by age and sex, displaying interesting parallels with clinical theories on dreams and early adolescence.
Azzone
P
P
Institute of Psychiatry, University of Milan, Milano, Italy.
Freni
S
S
Maggiolini
A
A
Provantini
K
K
Viganó
D
D
D000293:Adolescent; D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D004325:Dreams / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D005619:Freudian Theory; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D008960:Models, Psychological; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D000297:Psychology, Adolescent; D012737:Sex Factors; D013561:Symbolism; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014825:Vocabulary