ERIC Number: EJ968152
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2012-Jan
Pages: 17
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1366-7289
EISSN: N/A
Telling Stories in Two Languages: Narratives of Bilingual Preschool Children with Typical and Impaired Language
Iluz-Cohen, Peri; Walters, Joel
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, v15 spec iss n1 p58-74 Jan 2012
Two studies investigated five- and six-year-old preschool children's narrative production in an attempt to show how LI may impinge on narrative production in measurable ways. Study 1 analyzed renderings of familiar stories for group (typical language development vs. language impairment), story content (Jungle Book/Goldilocks) and language (English/Hebrew) differences on a range of discourse (story grammar categories), lexical (e.g., words, word types), morphosyntactic (e.g., verb inflections, prepositions) and bilingual (code-switching) measures. It showed intact performance for narrative structure in both groups and in both languages despite differences in lexis, morphosyntax and bilingualism. Study 2 pursued bilingual code-switching as a means to examine differences between children with typical language development (TLD) and language impairment (LI) in a retelling task where each child retold three stories (from native language/L1, second language/L2 and bilingual contexts) to interlocutors with different language preferences. Both groups showed sociolinguistic sensitivity in code-switching behavior, but frequency and directionality of code-switching revealed group differences. The article argues for the use of a range of indicators of LI including those unique to bilingual children.
Descriptors: Story Grammar, Form Classes (Languages), Language Impairments, Language Acquisition, Bilingualism, Second Language Learning, Preschool Children, Childrens Literature, English, Semitic Languages, Story Telling, Task Analysis, Code Switching (Language)
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
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Language: English
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