Inferential comprehension, age and language
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Josefin Lindgren
Abstract
This study investigates story comprehension in 46 German-Swedish 4- to 6-year-old bilinguals growing up in Sweden. The children’s inferential understanding of goals and emotions of story characters in visually presented stories was assessed in both German and Swedish, using the comprehension questions from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN; Gagarina et al., 2012, 2015) for the narrative tasks Cat/Dog and Baby Birds/Baby Goats. We analysed effects of age, language, and narrative task on overall comprehension scores and investigated whether comprehension scores were influenced by expressive vocabulary knowledge, operationalized as scores on a vocabulary task (Cross-Linguistic Lexical Task, CLT; Haman et al., 2015). Additionally, response patterns for the different comprehension questions were analysed.
We found effects of age, with 6-year-olds outperforming 4- and 5-year-olds, but no significant difference between the two younger groups. The development with age was similar in both languages and was consistent across tasks. The main effect of language was not significant, but when German was tested first, the children performed lower in German than in Swedish. When Swedish was tested first, no difference was found between the languages. The effect of expressive vocabulary was not the same in the two languages. In German, but not in Swedish, CLT expressive vocabulary scores significantly predicted narrative comprehension scores. The children’s inferential comprehension performance depended on the narrative task used, with higher scores for MAIN Cat/Dog than Baby Birds/Baby Goats, and response accuracy was also found to vary substantially between different comprehension questions. Response patterns to individual questions were strikingly similar in Swedish and German, suggesting that they may generalize across languages. The results indicate that an analysis of individual comprehension questions allows us to explore and detect patterns not visible in overall scores.
Abstract
This study investigates story comprehension in 46 German-Swedish 4- to 6-year-old bilinguals growing up in Sweden. The children’s inferential understanding of goals and emotions of story characters in visually presented stories was assessed in both German and Swedish, using the comprehension questions from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN; Gagarina et al., 2012, 2015) for the narrative tasks Cat/Dog and Baby Birds/Baby Goats. We analysed effects of age, language, and narrative task on overall comprehension scores and investigated whether comprehension scores were influenced by expressive vocabulary knowledge, operationalized as scores on a vocabulary task (Cross-Linguistic Lexical Task, CLT; Haman et al., 2015). Additionally, response patterns for the different comprehension questions were analysed.
We found effects of age, with 6-year-olds outperforming 4- and 5-year-olds, but no significant difference between the two younger groups. The development with age was similar in both languages and was consistent across tasks. The main effect of language was not significant, but when German was tested first, the children performed lower in German than in Swedish. When Swedish was tested first, no difference was found between the languages. The effect of expressive vocabulary was not the same in the two languages. In German, but not in Swedish, CLT expressive vocabulary scores significantly predicted narrative comprehension scores. The children’s inferential comprehension performance depended on the narrative task used, with higher scores for MAIN Cat/Dog than Baby Birds/Baby Goats, and response accuracy was also found to vary substantially between different comprehension questions. Response patterns to individual questions were strikingly similar in Swedish and German, suggesting that they may generalize across languages. The results indicate that an analysis of individual comprehension questions allows us to explore and detect patterns not visible in overall scores.
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
