Abstract
The present study examines narrative macrostructure, measured as Story Structure (SS) and Story Complexity (SC), in bilinguals speaking Russian as their home/heritage language (L1) and exposed to different societal languages (L2), while focusing on the effects of different L2s, bilingualism, and episodic structure and compares it to monolingual Russian. The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) was used to elicit narratives in L1/ Russian from 162 L2 Finnish, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, or Swedish bilinguals (4- and 6-year-olds) and 21 monolingual Russian children (4-year-olds). Age-matched bilinguals showed similarity in SS (except for children speaking L2 German or Hebrew) and SC. Monolinguals (age range 50–59 months) outperformed younger bilinguals (age range 48–59 months) in SS and SC but performed similarly to older bilinguals (age range 66–83 months). Fine-grained analysis revealed that a well-formed episode might include an Attempt-Outcome sequence combined with Internal States (and not only Goal-Attempt-Outcome) and that children are sensitive to events depicted in each episode. The findings show some evidence for the universality of macrostructure and provide insight into macrostructural knowledge at the episode level. The results are discussed within the theoretical model of multidimensional text organization.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Language Impairment in Multilingual Settings. LITMUS in action across Europe |
Editors | Sharon Armon-Lotem, Kleanthes K. Grohmann |
Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company |
Pages | 47-75 |
Number of pages | 29 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9789027258915 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2021 |
Publication series
Name | Trends in Language Acquisition Research |
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Volume | 29 |
ISSN (Print) | 1569-0644 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2021 John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Funding
This work was supported by the Leibniz Association (Natalia Gagarina), by the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF), grant number 1113/2010, and the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), grant number 779/10, to Sharon Armon-Lotem (Sveta Fichman), by the Ahlströms and Terserus Foundation (Natalia Ringblom), and by the Department of Language and Culture, UiT The Arctic University of Norway and the Research Council of Norway through its Centers of Excellence funding scheme, project number 223265 (Yulia Rodina) Rodina).
Funders | Funder number |
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Ahlströms and Terserus Foundation | |
Department of Language and Culture | |
Universitetet i Tromsø | |
Leibniz-Gemeinschaft | |
German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development | 1113/2010 |
Israel Science Foundation | 779/10 |
Norges Forskningsråd | 223265 |