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 pres ent study investigated dream language in a critical developmental stag e: early adolescence. Narratives of the dreams of 145 early adolescent s were tape-recorded and transcribed, and the frequencies of various g rammar forms and common words were calculated. The most common nouns f or the entire sample were house and mother. The most frequent verbs we re go and do. Males' dream narratives contained a greater number of su ch words as animal, long, enter, and kill. Females more often used int ransitive verbs and such words as teacher, horse, and put. Several fea tures differentiated older from younger early adolescents' dreams. The results indicate that Linguistic features of dream narratives are aff ected by age and sex, displaying interesting parallels with clinical t heories on dreams and early adolescence.