Character reference in Greek-German bilingual children’s narratives

Abstract

This study investigates reference management of two groups of 8–12 year old Greek–German bilinguals, resident in Greece (Bilinguals_GR N = 38) and in Germany (Bilinguals_GE N = 39). We analyze the bilinguals’ retellings in each language and compare them with data from two monolingual control groups of Greek and German children (Monolinguals_GR and Monolinguals_GE, N = 20 respectively). We seek to establish how the use of referential forms in character introduction, maintenance and reintroduction in the bilinguals’ narrative retellings is affected by language dominance and whether proficiency in each language patterns similarly with respect to dominance in input. Our results indicate that differences in choice of referential form can be attributed to language dominance. Bilingual production of referential expressions differed from that of monolinguals when exposure to one language outweighed the other, as in the case of Bilinguals_GE. Similarly, proficiency in terms of vocabulary, verb diversity and syntactic complexity was affected in the weaker language for this group, which showed a strong dominance in German input. When exposure was more balanced (Bilinguals_GR), proficiency measures in both languages were affected, but to a lesser degree.

Methodological Considerations on the Design and Compilation of a Spanish Learner Corpus

“…As such, we will have to develop an appropriate annotation system for our data, as well as to reflect on which statistical procedures will be used to analyse the data. First, the references to persons in the transcribed Spanish interlanguage data will be analysed and coded by means of an annotation scheme that will be developed on the basis of the coding scheme designed for our pilot study and advanced in other proposals in the literature, such as the annotation scheme for German proposed in Bauman and Riester (2010,2012,2013) and in , and the coding system by Andreou et al (2015) for referring expressions in Greek-German children's data. This coding system analysed the morpho-syntactic form of the expressions (e.g.…”

The effects of bilingualism on verbal and non verbal cognition

“…Jia and Fuse 2007) and language proficiency as possible factors that can affect the development of narrative abilities do exist, yet there is a restricted number of studies in bilingualism that take into consideration all external and internal variables that this thesis accounts for and which may affect children's narrative abilities. Some studies that involve Greek bilinguals focus on specific aspects of bilingualism, as for instance Torregrossa and Bongartz (2015) and Andreou, Knopp, Bongartz and Tsimpli (2015) on reference production of Greek-German bilingual children, Karpava, Kambanaros and Grohmann (2015) on narrative abilities of Russian-Greek Cypriot children, Kapia (2013) on narrative production of Greek-Albanian bilingual children, and Stamouli (2012) on the development of personal reference in written narratives of Turkish-Greek bilingual children. However, there have been only a few studies on children's narratives with Greek as one of the languages, e.g.…”

“…It is well known from the relevant literature that many bilinguals grow up in contexts where one of their two languages is dominant in their environment. Thus, "exposure to the dominant language outweighs exposure to the weaker language in terms of quantity and quality, and as a consequence the dominant language develops faster and with more solidly established intuitions than the other" (Andreou, Knopp, Bongartz andTsimpli 2015: 23, based on Yip andMatthews 2009). However, there is no consensus as to which experiential variable best captures dominance effects on the available input (for an overview Bedore, Peña, Summers, Boerger, Resendiz, Greene, Bohman and Gillam 2012).…”

“…The socioeconomic status of the children was measured by maternal education (in accordance with Esminger andFothergill 2003, Hoff, Laursen andTardif 2002) and it was calculated on a 5-point Likert-type scale, with 5 representing the highest educational level attained from compulsory primary education to tertiary education, which we adapted from the UBILEC (see also Andreou, Knopp, Bongartz and Tsimpli 2015;Unsworth 2013, and for an overview see Hoff 2006).…”

“…The significance of Early Literacy Preparedness as a predictor of bilinguals' performance has been recognized only recently. See, for instance, Andreou, Knopp, Bongartz and Tsimpli (2015) where Early Literacy Input was found responsible for the differences between Greek-German children living in Greece and Greek-German children living in Germany in the distribution of referential forms.…”