Studies of monolingual narrative production have revealed interacting paths in the development of coherence and cohesion across languages but less is known about bilingual narratives, where a gap may exist between socio-cognitive and linguistic abilities. The present longitudinal study explores the relations between measures of coherence and cohesion in the picture-based oral narratives elicited from 23 sequential bilinguals at two times -2nd and 4th years of exposure to Hebrew as L2 (ages 6 and 8, respectively), compared to those produced by agematched Hebrew speaking monolinguals. Measures of coherence included reference to story components, and to four types of causal relations: psychological, motivational, enabling and physical. These analyses served as a basis to explore cohesion in terms of (1) inter-clausal connectivity, and (2) the linguistic encoding of the causal chain, which in this context demanded reference to a complex motion event. We found that reference to narrative components and causal relations improved with age in both L1 and L2, but were largely delayed among bilinguals at age 6, particularly regarding the most complex scenes. While coherence measures reached to a parallel level among the 8 year-old children, measures of cohesion showed a different path of development in L1 and L2. Thus, the constraints imposed by language use in organizing the discourse resulted in a poorer connectivity between the clauses, and in less accurate lexico-grammatical encoding of the events in the bilingual narratives. The study underscores the mutual attraction between local and global principles of narrative construction, Requests for further information should be directed to Judy R. Kupersmitt, The development of coherence and cohesion in children's narratives 41 which may become dissociated in a bilingual situation, and pinpoints to vulnerable domains of L2 discourse-embedded acquisition.
Translation of the Bible or any other text unavoidably involves a determination about its meaning. There have been different views of meaning from ancient times up to the present, and a particularly Enlightenment and Modernist view is that the meaning of a text amounts to whatever the original author of the text intended it to be. This article analyzes the authorial-intent view of meaning in comparison with other models of literary and legal interpretation. Texts are anchors to interpretation but are subject to individualized interpretations. It is texts that are translated, not intentions. The challenge to the translator is to negotiate the meaning of a text and try to choose the most salient and appropriate interpretation as a basis for bringing the text to a new audience through translation.
The present study examines the linguistic expression of causal relations between the motion events within the main episode in a picture-based narrative. One hundred and fifty children aged 5–7 were asked to narrate a story based on a series of pictures: 45 Hebrew monolinguals (19 with Developmental Language Disorders [DLD]), 57 English–Hebrew bilinguals (20 with DLD) and 48 Russian–Hebrew bilinguals (21 with DLD). The narratives told by bilingual children with Typical Language Development (TLD) were as complex as those of their monolingual peers in occurrence of causal relations to establish a goal-oriented episode, and in the use of language forms as cohesive devices. By contrast, bilingual and monolingual children with DLD showed lower performance on expression of causal relations, particularly those involving more complex scenes that demand higher levels of linguistic complexity and content elaboration. The form–function analyses enabled an exploration of cognitive and language abilities in interaction in the context of narrative discourse production. The study reinforced the differences between children with TLD and children with DLD, showing that typical language development rather than the proficiency in a particular language is necessary for generating causal relations and the particular linguistic forms that together yield a coherent narrative.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.