Narrative comprehension in Lebanese Arabic-French bilingual children
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Rachel Fiani
Abstract
This chapter examines the development of comprehension of macrostructure in narratives by 48 simultaneous bilingual Lebanese Arabic-French children aged 4–9. Fictional storytelling and narrative comprehension tasks were administered in both languages, using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (Gagarina et al., 2012). The comprehension scores were compared across the two languages and analyzed in relation to age, macrostructure production scores, language dominance, expressive vocabulary, and a composite measure of exposure to stories. The results showed significant age effects on comprehension and no differences between languages, irrespectively of language dominance. Significant correlations were found between comprehension and production scores, between comprehension scores in both languages and exposure to stories in French, and between comprehension and expressive vocabulary. The results suggest that story comprehension is invariant across languages, meaning that a bilingual child carries over narrative abilities across languages even when one language is less dominant than the other. Nonetheless, the results also show that exposure to storytelling affects performance on macrostructure comprehension and that assessment of macrostructure comprehension requiring verbal answers necessitates minimal language proficiency.
Abstract
This chapter examines the development of comprehension of macrostructure in narratives by 48 simultaneous bilingual Lebanese Arabic-French children aged 4–9. Fictional storytelling and narrative comprehension tasks were administered in both languages, using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (Gagarina et al., 2012). The comprehension scores were compared across the two languages and analyzed in relation to age, macrostructure production scores, language dominance, expressive vocabulary, and a composite measure of exposure to stories. The results showed significant age effects on comprehension and no differences between languages, irrespectively of language dominance. Significant correlations were found between comprehension and production scores, between comprehension scores in both languages and exposure to stories in French, and between comprehension and expressive vocabulary. The results suggest that story comprehension is invariant across languages, meaning that a bilingual child carries over narrative abilities across languages even when one language is less dominant than the other. Nonetheless, the results also show that exposure to storytelling affects performance on macrostructure comprehension and that assessment of macrostructure comprehension requiring verbal answers necessitates minimal language proficiency.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledging our reviewers vii
- Cross-linguistic development of narrative comprehension from A to Z 1
- Narrative comprehension in Lebanese Arabic-French bilingual children 31
- Inferential comprehension, age and language 61
- Bilingual Turkish-Swedish children’s understanding of MAIN picture sequences 99
- Narrative comprehension in simultaneously bilingual Finnish-Swedish and monolingual Finnish children 149
- Narrative comprehension by Croatian-Italian bilingual children 5–7 years old 171
- Bilingual children’s lexical and narrative comprehension in Dutch as the majority language 197
- Why do you think the boy would be unhappy if he saw what the cat was eating? 231
- Narrative comprehension and its associations with gender and nonverbal cognitive skills in monolingual and bilingual German preschoolers 269
- Bilingualism effects in the narrative comprehension of children with Developmental Language Disorder and L2-Greek 297
- Commentary 331
- Index 337
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledging our reviewers vii
- Cross-linguistic development of narrative comprehension from A to Z 1
- Narrative comprehension in Lebanese Arabic-French bilingual children 31
- Inferential comprehension, age and language 61
- Bilingual Turkish-Swedish children’s understanding of MAIN picture sequences 99
- Narrative comprehension in simultaneously bilingual Finnish-Swedish and monolingual Finnish children 149
- Narrative comprehension by Croatian-Italian bilingual children 5–7 years old 171
- Bilingual children’s lexical and narrative comprehension in Dutch as the majority language 197
- Why do you think the boy would be unhappy if he saw what the cat was eating? 231
- Narrative comprehension and its associations with gender and nonverbal cognitive skills in monolingual and bilingual German preschoolers 269
- Bilingualism effects in the narrative comprehension of children with Developmental Language Disorder and L2-Greek 297
- Commentary 331
- Index 337
