Narrative Discourse in Bilingual Children: Language and Task Effects.

Christine E. Fiestas · Elizabeth D. Penña

197 citations0/0 files storedPubMed

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Language Development and Disorders Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism Child and Animal Learning Development

Abstract

PURPOSE: This study investigated the effect of language on Spanish-English bilingual children's production of narrative samples elicited in two ways. METHOD: Twelve bilingual (Spanish-English-speaking) children ranging in age from 4;0 (years;months) to 6;11 who were fluent speakers of English as a second language produced two narratives--one elicited by using a wordless picture book and another by using a static picture. The children produced stories for each task in each language, for a total of four stories. For the book task, the story complexities were compared across both languages. Stories were scored for complexity of story grammar and the inclusion of specific narrative elements. Both stories in each language were further analyzed for productivity (total words, number of C-units, and mean length of C-unit). The grammaticality (proportion of grammatically acceptable C-units) and the proportion of utterances influenced by the nontarget language was compared across each language and story task. RESULTS: Children produced narratives of equal complexity for the book task regardless of language. However, children used more attempts and initiating events in Spanish, while producing more consequences in English. The picture task yielded mixed results, and these were not compared quantitatively. There were differences in the two task conditions with respect to the children's use of Spanish-influenced English and English-influenced Spanish. Although children were equally productive in both languages, they used proportionally more Spanish-influenced utterances in the book task. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: The results demonstrate the importance of considering the test language when eliciting narratives from bilingual children and the type of the narrative task for eliciting a productive and complex narrative.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 197 citations exist upstream.

References

1988Classroom Discourse: The Language of Teaching and Learning 1995WAYS WITH WORDS 2013Relating Events in Narrative 1991Interdependence of first- and second-language proficiency in bilingual children 1997The relation of input factors to lexical learning by bilingual infants 1976Language Development: Kindergarten Through Grade Twelve 1987Language-Impaired 4-Year-Olds 1992Language development : an introduction

Cited by

2015Macrostructure, microstructure, and mental state terms in the narratives of English–Hebrew bilingual preschool children with and without specific language impairment 2010Language sample measures and language ability in Spanish-English bilingual kindergarteners 2015Narrative production in monolingual and bilingual children with specific language impairment 2010Phonological Acquisition in Bilingual Spanish–English Speaking Children 2011Telling stories in two languages: Narratives of bilingual preschool children with typical and impaired language

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.