How do narrative and language skills relate to each other?

Abstract

Past studies on narratives have identified two main dimensions of narrative production: the story-related narrative quality, which relates to the narrative structure and evaluations, and the language-related quality, which relates to the appropriate use of linguistic devices that contribute to the overall discourse cohesion. Although studies on the language development of monolinguals and bilinguals have demonstrated the developmental nature of the two different narrative dimensions, little attention has been paid to the potential relationship between them. Thus, this study aimed to identify the interrelationship between the two main narrative quality skills and explored the role of cross-language facilitations for performance on each of these narrative dimensions. Oral Frog Story narratives produced by 70 six-year-old Korean English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners were analyzed. The findings indicated that the two narrative sub-dimensions play facilitative roles for each other within English (L2), and that there are cross-language contributions for only the linguistic quality of narratives. The findings are discussed in relation to the bilingual children's language proficiency and the degree of differences in narrative conventions across the two languages.

The narrative macrostructure production of Spanish–English bilingual preschoolers: Within- and cross-language relations

“…In contrast, children who are dominant in one language may lack the necessary vocabulary and grammatical skills in their weaker language to support the use of macrostructure features in that language, even if they have previously acquired these features in their stronger language. This idea is supported by the work of Kang (2012) and Rezzonico et al (2016) discussed above. The children in Kang's (2012) study were reported to have stronger Korean abilities, so they may not have developed the linguistic skills needed in English to convey more advanced macrostructure features previously acquired in Korean; as such, there was no cross-language association.…”

“…At present, two studies have examined cross-language macrostructure associations concurrent with associations between microstructure and macrostructure in the narratives of young bilinguals, but their findings differ. Kang (2012) examined 5-to 6-year-old Korean-English bilinguals and found that English microstructure measures predicted children's production of English macrostructure; however, children's production of Korean macrostructure was not a significant predictor of English macrostructure when controlling for English narrative microstructure measures. Contrary to Kang's findings, Rezzonico et al (2016) examined 4-to 5-year-old Cantonese-English bilingual children and found that Cantonese macrostructure did predict English macrostructure after controlling for English microstructure measures.…”

“…This includes children who are dominant in one language, and children with relatively balanced dual-language abilities (Bialystok, 2001). Previous studies suggest that language dominance may impact the strength of cross-and within-language narrative relations (e.g., Kang, 2012;Montanari, 2004;Viberg, 2001), although this idea has yet to be tested. Therefore, this study also investigated whether language dominance impacted narrative relations.…”

“…Yet, the cross-language studies that included preschool-age children produced inconsistent results. A lack of cross-language influence was observed in three studies of bilingual children ranging from 4 to 6 years of age who spoke different language pairs, including Kang (2012) when examining the associations between macrostructure scores of Korean-English bilinguals; by Kapalková, Polišenská, Marková, and Fenton (2016) when examining mean Swedish and English macrostructure scores; and by Fiestas and Peña (2004) when examining individual macrostructure features produced in Spanish and in English. Other studies of 4-to 6-year-old bilinguals, however, found cross-language macrostructure relations using correlations (e.g., Rodina, 2017) or found equivalence between macrostructure scores when examining means (e.g., Altman, Armon-Lotem, Fichman, & Walters, 2016;Kunnari, Välimaa, & Laukkanen-Nevala, 2016;Méndez, Perry, Holt, Bian, & Fafulas, 2018).…”

“…Although no equivalent research on Spanish-English bilingual preschoolers exists, three studies examined the within-language relations between macrostructure and microstructure in the narratives of school-age bilingual children (ages 5-7). Two of the studies involved children whose languages were typologically different (Iluz-Cohen & Walters, 2012;Kang, 2012), whereas the third study by Lucero (2015) focused on Spanish-English bilinguals. The results of each study demonstrated associations between microstructure features (i.e., number of function words, type-token ratio, NDW, and MLU) and macrostructure within each language.…”