Reference maintenance in the narratives of Albanian–Greek and Russian–Greek children with Developmental Language Disorder: A study on crosslinguistic effects

Abstract

Although a considerable number of studies have shown D(eterminer) elements, i.e. determiners and pronominal clitics, to be particularly vulnerable to impairment in monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), little is known about the use of appropriate or/and grammatically correct referring expressions in the children’s narrative production. Grammars of languages that differ in the way they encode and realize their D system may be viewed as the ideal context to disentangle the contribution of language (L1) transfer and morpho-syntactic impairment to reference use in the L2. The aim of the current study is to examine L1 effects in the use of referring expressions of 5- to 11-year-old Albanian–Greek and Russian–Greek children with DLD, along with typically developing (TD) bilingual groups speaking the same language pairs when maintaining reference to characters in their narratives. The three languages differ in their D elements, since Albanian and Greek have morphologically rich D systems in contrast to Russian, which lacks a definiteness distinction. Children produced oral narratives in Greek by using the Greek versions of two stories ( Cat and Dog) which have been designed within the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) tool of the COST Action IS0804. Results show that the groups did not differ in referential appropriateness. Regarding grammatical correctness, both groups with DLD produced more ungrammatical forms than TD children, while Russian–Greek children with DLD produced more ungrammatical article-less NPs than the other groups. The overall results reflect the joint contribution of language impairment and L1-specific typological properties in the definite forms used for character maintenance by bilingual children with DLD.

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

“…This can create challenges for quantitative analyses, unless a sufficiently large number of participants are included. With limited data, breaking down the analysis into many dependent variables gives a fragmented view and risks missing global effects (unless the two approaches are combined, as in Andreou 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);…”

“…The impact of cross-linguistic influence and of DLD on morphosyntactic accuracy and referential choices (Andreou et al, 2020; Fichmann et al, 2020);…”

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

“…This points to the influence of L1-specific typological influences on the use of referential expressions in the L2. Andreou et al (2022) investigate reference maintenance in the narratives of 100 sequentially bilingual children with and without a diagnosis of DLD across a relatively large age range (5-11 years): 50 with L1 Albanian (25 DLD, 25 TD) and 50 with L1 Russian (25 DLD, 25 TD). Albanian has overt articles, and clitics and widespread null subjects, similar to the target language Greek, while Russian lacks articles, clitics and is more restrictive concerning subject-drop.…”

Effects of second-language acquisition on character introductions in 5- and 7-year-old bilingual and monolingual children’s Frog story narratives

“…Bilinguals who learn a language that encodes character references different from their L1 might find it hard to adjust the requirements of their L2 or vice versa, such as in the case of Chinese–English (Chen and Lei, 2013; Chen & Pan, 2009; Jia and Paradis, 2015) or Russian–English (Topaj, 2010). Andreou, Peristeri and Tsimpli (2020) investigated the L1 effects on referential expressions to maintain characters in the narratives of 5- to 11-year-old Albanian–Greek and Russian–Greek typically developing children and children with developmental language disorder. The results indicated a combined effect of L1-specific typological properties as well as language impairment.…”