Character introductions in oral narratives of Swedish–German bilingual preschoolers

Abstract

Closely related Swedish and German both mark information status of referents morphologically, though little is known about its acquisition. This study investigates character introductions in the narratives of 4- and 6-year-old Swedish–German bilinguals ( N = 40) in both languages, elicited with MAIN Cat/Dog. We analyse effects of age group, language and animacy (human vs nonhuman characters) on the type of referring expression (indefinite NP and pronoun), as well as effects of language proficiency and exposure on the use of indefinite NPs for each language. We also explore which syntactic constructions indefinite NPs occur in. A significant difference was found between the two age groups, but not between languages. No effect was found of language skills or exposure. Four-year-olds used more pronouns and a lower proportion of indefinite NPs than 6-year-olds. Pronouns were more frequent for the human character than for nonhuman animate characters. Whilst animacy (humanness) promoted the use of pronouns, it did not affect the choice of morphological form for lexical NPs (indefinite/definite). The age groups differed in how indefinite NPs were used. Four-year-olds produced fewer narrative presentations (where a character is introduced as part of a typical story opening, e.g. Once upon a time there was a cat) than 6-year-olds, and more labellings (with only an NP, or a clausal predicative, e.g. That’s a cat). Qualitative analyses suggest that the children’s indefinite NPs in labelling constructions can be both referential (when setting the narrative scene), and type-denoting (when naming referents in individual pictures). Whilst the children’s abilities to introduce story characters develop measurably from 4 to 6 years in Swedish and German, appropriateness of character introductions not only depends on whether an indefinite NP is chosen, but also on the syntactic construction this indefinite NP is used in.

Reference to characters in narratives of Russian-Hebrew bilingual and Russian and Hebrew monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder and typical language development

“…The difference between the current results and those reported by Lindgren et al (2022) might be related to differences in procedures. Lindgren et al (2022) used a standard MAIN procedure where pictures are not available to the listener. In this research, pictures were available during storytelling, which may have led to greater use of definite NPs for character Introduction due to shared knowledge.…”

Opportunities and challenges in the analysis of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN)

“…Lindgren et al (2020) found no difference in performance between the bilinguals’ two languages at group level, and no significant impact of language exposure or proficiency, and advocate the need to go beyond frequencies. They provide an insightful qualitative analysis of individual differences, focusing on children’s use of the presentation and labelling constructions, and revealing more advanced narrative abilities in the 6-year-olds (compared with the 4-year-olds).…”

“…In other words, narrative cohesion is a prerequisite for the evaluation of discourse-pragmatic appropriateness in this task; the intention to encode a referent as introduction or maintenance needs to be established. Interesting examples where this appears not to be the case are discussed by Fichmann et al (2020) and by Lindgren et al (2020).…”

“…The discourse appropriateness of referential expressions in reference introduction (Lindgren et al, 2020) and reference maintenance (Andreou et al, 2020) or in both (Fichmann et al, 2020; Hržica & Kuvač Kraljević, 2020);…”

“…Developmental effects in the encoding of new information by young bilinguals (Lindgren et al, 2020).…”