Linguistic consequences of toing and froing: factors that modulate narrative development in bilingual returnee children

Abstract

This longitudinal study examined the development of narrative micro-and macrostructure in Japanese-English bilingual returnee children. Returnees are children of immigrant families who move to a foreign country, spending a significant portion of their formative developmental years in the foreign majority language context before returning to their native language environment. The returnees did a narrative task in both their L1 (Japanese) and L2 (English) immediately upon their return to their native language environment and a year after. The results showed no aggregate significant changes in L1 or L2 micro-and macrostructure over time. However, at the individual level, the degree of maintenance of L2 microstructure was modulated by L2 exposure. That is, children who continued to receive L2 exposure better maintained their English microstructure (i.e. Type-Token Ratio and Verbs per Utterance) despite being re-immersed in the L1 environment. In terms of their Japanese, the age of return to the L1 environment and relative proficiency predicted the development of their Japanese microstructure (i.e. MLU, Fluency, Type-Token Ratio) and macrostructure. Our study is the first to track both languages of bilingual returnee children over time, revealing that different background variables affect the change in returnee children's L1 and L2 narrative abilities.

Measurement of Lexical Diversity in Children’s Spoken Language: Computational and Conceptual Considerations

“… Charest et al (2020) pronounced TTR “disfavored for clinical use” (p. 1868) and not worthy of research investigation. Thus, it is dispiriting to note its frequent use in clinical practice ( Finestack and Satterlund, 2018 ), in texts that educate clinicians in training, and even recent research articles examining measurement of expressive child language skills ( Gonzalez Villasanti et al, 2020 ; Manning et al, 2020 ; Kubota et al, 2021 ; Arjmandi et al, 2022 ). In this study, across more than 1500 conversational language samples from children ages 2 to 6 years of age, TTR was worse than uninformative: if used to make clinical decisions, it would have identified numerous children with known impairment as typically functioning, while identifying otherwise typical children as deficient in expressive lexical diversity during conversation.…”

Factors Influencing L2 Maintenance in the L1 Environment: A Case Study of an Arab Returnee Child

“…As emphasized by Reinders (2017), multiplayer online role-playing games "create many opportunities for collaboration and competition and rich opportunities for exposure to L2 input as well as opportunities for L2 output and interaction" (p. 332). The study contributes to the field and discusses how the available technology allowed the returnee to continue to receive abundant L2 input, use the L2 daily, and interact with native speakers after returning home and how that aligns with recent findings on the significance of continued L2 input post-return (e.g., Huensch et al, 2019;Kubota et al, 2020Kubota et al, , 2021.…”

“…Researchers have recognized the continued L2 input post-return (Slavkov, 2015) and active bilingualism (Kubota et al, 2020) in the L2 environment as major factors in L2 maintenance and improvement. For instance, Kubota et al (2021) found that returnees who continued to receive L2 input better maintained their English microstructure after being re-immersed in the L1 environment. Slavkov (2015) declares that "continued input in a language that has become passive can be beneficial" (p. 715).…”

“…As such, here comes the importance of this study. In addition to the fact that research on returnee children is scarce (Kubota et al, 2021), most studies on children returnees' L2 attrition have been conducted years before the era of social media and web 2.0 (e.g., Flores, 2010;Fujita, 2000Fujita, , 2002Reetz-Kurashige, 1999;Tomiyama, 2000Tomiyama, , 2009Yoshitomi, 1999). Given the influence of technology on language learning, the importance of this research is that it attempts to enrich our knowledge of the role of technology in L2 learning and shows how its influence can be extended to L2 maintenance.…”

“I no longer count in German.” On dominance shift in returnee heritage speakers

“…Supporting evidence comes, mainly, from studies on Turkish returnees, who moved (back) to Turkey from Germany (Antonova-Unlu et al, 2021;Daller, 1999;Daller & Yıldız, 1995;Kaya-Soykan et al, 2020;Treffers-Daller et al, 2007;. Research on other "reactivated" HLs is still residual (see Rato, 2016, on global accent, andKubota et al, 2021, on the narrative abilities of children who returned to Japan from an English-speaking country).…”