Narrative Discourse in Bilingual
Children: Language and Task Effects
Fiestas , C.E. and Pena, E.D.
2004
INTRODUCTION:
• Children in different language and cultural
communities may exhibit differences in
discourse production especially in narratives.
These differences are found in story length,
the amount of descriptive information given,
the personal relationships of the characters,
the sequence of action and the predominant
verb tense. (Berman & Slobin 1994; Bocaz,
1986 ; Guiterrez-Clellen, Pena, & Quinn, 1995)
• Narratives of bilingual children: The studies in this area are
limited and suggest that bilingual children may produce
different narratives in each of their two languages. (Bayley
&Pease-Alvarez,1997)
• Research is inconclusive as to whether these differences
are a matter of:
• *variation of bilingual language proficiency.
• *linguistic structural differences.
• *cultural differences related to the acquisition of the two
languages.
• Therefore, it is important to determine if differences exist
in narrative skills of bilingual children with relatively
equal proficiency in both languages.
Why is a documentation of bilingual
narrative production needed?
• It can be used as an assessment tool for children with language
impairments and learning disabilities.(Bolting, 2002; Hadely, 1998;
Merritt & Liles, 1989)
• Studies show a correlation of children’s narrative language skills to
both the acquisition of literacy and academic performance.
• Narrative assessment is a less biased alternative to standardized
testing because cultures all over the world use narratives to relate
and interpret experience. (Cloud,1991; Gutierrez-Clellen,
1995;Jax,1998; Oller & Damico, 1991)
• Therefore, one must be able to describe typical performance and
understand normal variation among groups of children in bilingual
environments. (Gutierrez-Clellen, &Iglasias,1992
Langdon,1992;Valdes & Figueroa, 1994)
Crosscultural Variation in Narrative
Production:
• Cultural differences may play a large role in the
types of narratives that children produce because
children learn from the narrative examples
produced by their families and their culture. For
example, the narrative style of U.S Latino culture
varies from mainstream American culture. Thus,
it was reported that Latino children narrated
descriptive information related to family and
personal relationships while European North
American children narrated sequences of
events.(Cazden,1986; Silva & McCabe, 1996)
Crosslinguistic Variation in Narrative
Production:
• Narrative differences may also be due to linguistic factors;
such as, tense, aspect, locative movement, connectivity and
rhetorical style which vary across languages. (German and
Slohin, 1994)
• For English and Spanish comparison, the systematic
differences were found in: encoding motion( climb up in
English vs. ascend in Spanish) , marking the subject ( overt
subject in English vs. subject marked in verb morphology in
Spanish) and use of verb tense ( past tense in English vs.
present progressive in Spanish)
• Evidence from studies demonstrates that bilingual
children employ language specific linguistic devices to
formulate narratives in each of their languages, but are
grammatical in each of their languages.
Narrative Differences due to
Contextual Support:
• Narrative performance may be influenced by:
• The contextual support offered by the elicitation
techniques such as a picture, a game, a film , a
book or mere memory.
• The topic of the narrative
• Studies demonstrate that the amount of
contextual support provided by the elicitation
procedure and the previous knowledge and
experience with a topic will affect the complexity
of the children’s stories.
COMPLEXITY:
• The complexity of narratives is assessed by:
• Afory grammar which is a specific set of rules about
what makes up a story. (Bamberg, 1987). These
elements include: setting/ initiating event/ internal
response or plan / attempts / consequences and
ending. (Applebee, 1978; Gillam et al.,1995; Hughes et
al., 1997)
• Story length, number of C-units (A C-unit is defined as
the independent clause plus its modifiers) and number
of words. (Leadholm & Miller, 1995)
• Grammaticality and dialect use. (Gutierrez et al., 2000)
Table 1: Story Grammar Elements
Component
Code
Description
Setting
SET
Introduces the main
characters and tells where
the story takes place
Initiating event
IE
A statement of the
problem
Internal response
IR
Thinking or feeling
statements
Plan
PLN
A character’s plan to
achieve aims
Attempt/action
ATT
An attempt to solve the
problem
Consequence
CON
The result of the attempt
or action, an outcome
Ending
END
A resolution of the
problem , can also be a
Expectation for Bilinguals
• Linguistic differences, crosscultural differences
and elicitation procedures may all impact
bilingual children’s performance on discourse
tasks. Thus, it is important to examine:
• The effect of language of elicitation and
elicitation technique on narrative performance.
• The productivity, grammaticality and complexity
of narratives which provide insight into the
cognitive narrative schema of bilingual children.
• The existence of possible linguistic trade-offs
between languages.
Purpose of Study:
• The purposes of the study were to:
• Compare the narrative skills of Spanish/English
bilingual children across both of their languages
in two different narrative contexts
• Analyze two types of narrative elicitation stimuli
,both high and low contextual support, in their
ability to elicit a complex and productive
narrative from bilingual Spanish/English
elementary school-aged children.
Methods:
• Participants: 12 bilingual Latino American children (6 boys and 6
girls) between the ages of 4;0(years; months) and 6;11 were
selected. All children were TD according to parent and school
report. All were fluent in Spanish and English. On average, children
had 63% input in Spanish and 37% input in English.
• Procedure: Four narratives were elicited from the children, using
two elicitation tasks ( a wordless book task and a picture task of a
birthday party) in each language in two sessions over a 2-4 week
period. Each session was conducted in one language, and children
were asked to generate two narratives in that language.
• Transcription and Coding: All narratives were audio recorded and
transcribed verbatim by bilingual research assistants. The
transcripts were segmented into communication units ( C-units).
• Narratives were analyzed for;
• story grammar by examining whether children included at least
once the story elements in TABLE 1. The picture task was not
coded for story grammar since it yielded mixed results.
• Overall Complexity by using a range from 0-7 based on what story
elements were included as in TABLE 2.
• Productivity by using the SALT (The Systematic Analysis of Language
Transcripts) to measure mean length of C –units in words (MLCWords), number of C units and number of words.
• Grammaticality : by coding each utterance being grammatical [G],
ungrammatical [U] and influenced [I] which was considered
grammatical as well.
• Reliability: by rating the stories by two raters independently.
Table 2 : Complexity score
Score
Description
Level 1
Describes character(s), surroundings, and
habitual actions with no causal relations.
Level 2
Lists actions that are chronologically , but
not causally ordered.
Level 3
Includes a series of actions , each of
which automatically causes other actions
but with no planning involved ; no clear
goal –directed behavior.
Level 4
Provides aims or intentions of a character
, but does not explicitly state the
character’s plan to achieve aims ;
planning must be inferred.
Level 5
States planning, but one or more of the
three essential story grammar parts of a
complete episode is missing , initiating
event , attempt, or consequence
RESULTS:
• Story Complexity : Book Task
• Children told stories of relatively equal complexity in
Spanish (M=5.08)and in English (M=4.75). However,
when the story grammar elements were compared ,
there was a significant main effect for narrative
elements F(6,66)=10.194, p<.001 and a significant
language *narrative element interaction p=.034.In
Spanish, children included the elements initiating event
and attempt more frequently than they did in
English.(p<0.05) In English , children included
consequence more frequently than they did in Spanish
(p<0,05) FIGURE 1
Figure 1. Comparison of Performance for Individual Story Grammar Elements
in both Spanish and English
• Story Complexity: Picture task
• Scoring the story grammar elements was not
considered appropriate for the picture task
because this type of task elicited mixed
results. Children interpreted the task
differently and produced description of
routines and sequential action of a general
birthday party without telling a story.
• Productivity : Book Task
• Results demonstrated no main effect with
language or significant interactions with
language. F=(1,11)=0.634, P=.443. The means
for the productivity measures in Spanish and
English were comparable.( TABLE 3)
Table 3: Language comparison of mean (standard deviation) productive
measures for each task (N=12)
BOOK
Spanish
PICTURE
English
Spanish
English
33.75 (9.99)
20.17 (4.65)
19.50 (11.00)
Mean length of 5.19 (0.72)
C-units
5.44 (0,78)
4.65 (1.73)
4.74 (1.28)
Number of
words
186.83 (76.40)
96.42 (49.33)
101.08 (76.03)
Number of C- 31.67 (11.93)
units
168.08 (81.55)
• Productivity: Picture Task
• The picture task yielded similar results to the
book task in that there was no significant main
effect of language on any of the three
productivity measures, and there were no
significant interactions with language.
F(1,11)=0.032, p=0.862. The means for the
productivity measures in Spanish and English
were very similar .(TABLE 3)
• Grammaticality: Book and Picture Task
• Results for the grammatical measures showed no
significant main effects for task(p=.915) or language
(p=.068)for the percentage of grammatically correct
utterances and no significant interactions. Children
demonstrated comparable proportions of grammatical
utterances in both languages across both tasks (TABLE 4)
although there was a slightly higher percentage of
grammatical utterances in Spanish. On the other hand,
examination of the percentage of influenced utterances
demonstrated a significant main effect for language
.(p=0.001). Children used more Spanish-influenced English
utterances for the book task than they did English –
influenced Spanish utterances for the book task.
Table 4: Task and language comparison of mean (standard deviation)
grammatical measures (N=12)
BOOK
PICTURE
Spanish
English
Spanish
English
Grammatical
utterances
86.58 (7.98)
79.67 (12.72)
84.58 (11.48)
81.17 (6.85)
Influenced
utterances
2.92 (5.50)
38.83 (17.97)
2,25 (3.98)
17.92 (22.18)
DISCUSSION
• LANGUAGE EFFECTS:
• COMPLEXITY: Children told stories that were equally
complex in both Spanish and English in the wordless picture
book task. However, there were contrasts between the
Spanish and English narratives with respect to the
children’s inclusion of specific story grammar elements; i.e.
initiating event and attempt in Spanish and a consequence
in English. Reasons for this difference could be:
• A bicultural difference may yield a difference in including
specific story grammar elements.
• A different exposure to stories and vocabulary of
storytelling in school as compared to at home.
• Further study with a large sample is needed .
• PRODUCTIVITY: All three productivity
measures were comparable in Spanish and
English for both narrative tasks. It appears
that children’s expectations about story length
and how much information to verbalize given
a specific narrative task is an interrelated skill
in both languages of these bilingual children.
The productivity aspect of narrative language
skill might be more likely to transfer from one
language to another.( Cummins,1991)
•
•
•
•
•
•
TASK EFFECTS:
The elicitation procedure or language of the task did not significantly affect the
grammaticality of the children’s utterances.
Children’s discourse differed in productive and grammatical measures when
elicited by the wordless picture book or the picture regardless of language.
WHY?
The contextual support offered by pictures of consecutive events as in the book
task may have allowed children to use utterances that were longer and more
complex and decreased dependence on memory or imagination to sustain their
discourse. (Coelho, Liles, & Duffy, 1990)
On the other hand, the birthday picture may have invited more of a script and a
limited personal narrative. The results of the picture narratives were mixed
between telling a story about the picture and telling a personal narrative.
However, the picture task did elicit a fairly long discourse sample in both
languages because it was culturally relevant and of high interest to the children.
• Results showed significant language by task effects concerning the
number of influenced utterances. In the book task , the children
used more Spanish-influenced utterances, and for the picture task ,
more English-influenced utterances.
• WHY?
• The children were sequential bilinguals learning Spanish first at
home, and then English later at school. Because the book task
required more complex stories, children were able to produce
complex stories in English by using Spanish-influenced utterances.
• The increase of Spanish-influenced utterances is a linguistic tradeoff , occurring because children were able to produce more
complex utterances through decreasing self monitoring of their
English grammar.
• The types of influenced grammar were
qualitatively different by language: In English,
influences were on verb usage, pronoun omission
and syntactic ones. In Spanish, influences were
strictly code-switching at the word and phrase
level.
• Children, whose Spanish was their first language,
did not use the types of English-influenced
Spanish that Spanish second language learners
use.
CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS:
Clinicians should use caution in using just any discourse
task as a narrative task since cues and stimuli used to
elicit narratives may not yield comparable results.
LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY:
Mixed results were obtained from the picture task. It was
not a useful comparison against the book task for
measures of complexity and productivity.
The small sample size and age range of the children did
not provide sufficient data to describe typical
development of the narrative skills of this population
of both languages.