Polish–English bilingual children overuse referential markers: MLU inflation in Polish-language narratives

Otwinowska, Agnieszka; Opacki, Marcin; Mieszkowska, Karolina; Białecka‐Pikul, Marta; Wodniecka, Zofia; Haman, Ewa

doi:10.1177/0142723720933769

Cited by 15 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 62 publications

(141 reference statements)

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“…Nonetheless, these similarities between mono-and bilingual groups should not belie some intriguing differences: the stories of Polish-English bilinguals tend to have higher MLU than those of Polish monolinguals. A corpus analysis of narratives demonstrated that this is due to the overuse of referential markers in the narratives of bilinguals, which is in turn caused by cross-language transfer at the syntax-pragmatics level from English to Polish (Otwinowska et al, 2020).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, establishing an order of the testing modes constant across participants (first the Telling, then the Model Story followed by the Retelling) allowed us to compare the children's stories as told spontaneously (based on picture-stories) and as retold after a model story. Below, we present the results obtained with the use of the unpublished MAIN-Polish and presented in four publications (Haman et al, 2017;Mieszkowska, 2018;Otwinowska et al, 2018;Otwinowska et al, 2020). We then discuss them in relation to some studies that employed the original MAIN procedure.…”

Section: The Polish Main Versionsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Note the empty slots (Ø) where the English pronouns (carriers of reference) would be. In our paper (Otwinowska et al, 2020) we investigated the use of referential markers in Polish narratives produced by Polish-English bilingual children and their Polish monolingual peers. We analysed data from 92 bilinguals and 92 Polish monolinguals matched for age, gender and non-verbal IQ (as before, the children did not differ in SES, but were not matched for it).…”

Section: Bilinguals Overuse Overt Referential Markers: Mlu Inflation mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Polish MAIN: how was it developed and how has it been used so far?

Mieszkowska¹,

Otwinowska²,

Białecka‐Pikul³

et al. 2020

Zaspil

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This paper describes in detail the development of the Polish version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). We first describe its two earlier versions, the unpublished version and the published version, developed in 2012, as well as the revised version. We also justify the differences between the unpublished Polish version developed in 2012 and the original MAIN. Then we summarize the results from studies that used the unpublished version of the Polish MAIN. We end with outlining a study that could be conducted to compare the two slightly different procedures in order to examine whether the results obtained with MAIN are resistant to changes in the procedure details.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Polish Main Versionsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Bilinguals Overuse Overt Referential Markers: Mlu Inflation mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Polish MAIN: how was it developed and how has it been used so far?

Mieszkowska¹,

Otwinowska²,

Białecka‐Pikul³

et al. 2020

Zaspil

Self Cite

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show abstract

“…For example, establishing an order of the testing modes constant across participants (first the Telling, then the Model Story followed by the Retelling) allowed us to compare the children's stories as told spontaneously (based on picture-stories) and as retold after a model story. Below, we present the results obtained with the use of the unpublished MAIN-Polish and presented in four publications (Haman et al, 2017;Mieszkowska, 2018;Otwinowska et al, 2020). We then discuss them in relation to some studies that employed the original MAIN procedure.…”

Section: Comprehension Questionsmentioning

confidence: 97%

New language versions of MAIN: Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives – Revised

Gagarina¹,

Lindgren²

2020

Zaspil

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The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) is a theoretically grounded toolkit that employs parallelpictorial stimuli to explore and assess narrative skills in children in many different languages. It is part of the LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) battery of tests that were developed in connection with the COST Action IS0804 Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment(2009−2013). MAIN hasbeen designed to assess both narrative production and comprehensionin children who acquire one or more languages from birth or from early age. Its design allows for the comparable assessment of narrative skills in several languages in the same child and in different elicitation modes: Telling, Retelling and Model Story. MAIN contains four parallel stories, each with a carefully designed six-picture sequence based on a theoretical model of multidimensional story organization. The stories are controlled for cognitive and linguistic complexity, parallelism in macrostructure and microstructure, as well as for cultural appropriateness and robustness. As a tool MAIN had been used to compare children’s narrative skills across languages, and also to help differentiate between childrenwith and without developmental language disorders, both monolinguals and bilinguals. This volume consists of two parts. The main content of Part I consists of33 papers describing the process of adapting and translating MAIN to a large number of languagesfrom different parts of the world. Part II contains materials for use for about 80 languages, including pictorial stimuli, which are accessible after registration. MAIN was first published in 2012/2013 (ZASPiL56). Several years of theory development and material construction preceded this launch. In 2019 (ZASPiL 63), the revised English version (revised on the basis of over 2,500 transcribed MAIN narratives as well as ca 24,000 responses to MAIN comprehension questions, collected from around 700 monolingual and bilingual children in Germany, Russia and Sweden between 2013-2019) was published together with revised versions in German, Russian, Swedish, and Turkish for the bilingual Turkish-Swedish population in Sweden. The present 2020 (ZASPiL 64) volume contains new and revised language versions of MAIN.

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“…In the following, the five research papers of this special issue are briefly described. Otwinowska et al (2022) compare the narratives of two groups of 4-to -6-year-olds: 92 monolingual Polish children in Poland (age 4;3-7;0) vs 92 bilingual Polish/English children in the United Kingdom (age 4;5-6;9). Storytelling (story generation) in Polish was elicited with the MAIN Baby Birds and Baby Goats picture sequences; Cat and Dog were used for retelling.…”

Section: This Special Issuementioning

confidence: 99%

A new perspective on referentiality in elicited narratives: Introduction to the Special Issue

Gagarina

Bohnacker

2021

First Language

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This special issue investigates the use of referential expressions in elicited picture-based narratives by children with and without developmental language disorders, across a range of languages and language combinations. All contributions use the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN, Gagarina et al. 2012, 2019). The studies featured in this issue cover monolingual and bilingual children aged 4–11 years, but focus mainly on age 4–7, a period in a child’s life where great strides are made in the development of narrative skills. This collection of papers offers a new perspective on referentiality for several reasons: all studies use the same stimuli and by and large the same procedure for the elicitation of narratives. The stimuli, four picture-based stories, are controlled for comparability of protagonists, plot and story structure. They were designed as a ‘visual’ representation of a multidimensional model of story grammar. This methodological and theoretical base allows for a comparative investigation of referentiality (including reference introduction, maintenance and reintroduction) in narratives, across languages and populations. This introduction addresses theoretical aspects of referentiality in decontextualised discourse and reviews the literature regarding the impact of language-specific referential systems and the age and path of acquisition in typically developing children and children with developmental language disorders. We also discuss methodological aspects of eliciting referentiality in narratives in detail. This introduction thus seeks explanations for the diverse and sometimes contradictory empirical results regarding children’s mastery of referentiality. Finally, an overview of the contributions in the special issue is given.

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Polish–English bilingual children overuse referential markers: MLU inflation in Polish-language narratives

Cited by 15 publications

References 62 publications

Polish MAIN: how was it developed and how has it been used so far?

Polish MAIN: how was it developed and how has it been used so far?

New language versions of MAIN: Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives – Revised

A new perspective on referentiality in elicited narratives: Introduction to the Special Issue

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