Document Type : Original Article
Author
Linguistics Department, Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies
Abstract
Assessing the development of narrative skills is one of the practical and mostly used methods in research related to bilingualism, language acquisition, and language impairment. Especially, tools designed based on the story grammar which focuses on both cognitive and linguistic skills attracted a lot of attention. This comparative study is aimed at investigating the complexity of Persian narrative structure of monolingual and Persian-Mazandarani bilingual children. The sample includes 16 bilingual boys and girls aged from 4 to 6, and 16 monolinguals matched in age and sex. The independent and control variables are bilingualism, gender, and age. The picture story, ‘Frog where are you?’ (Mayer, 1969) was used to extract data. The framework introduced in the test of narrative language (TNL-Pr) (Gillam & Gillam, 2009) is used to analyze the narrative complexity. According to the results, the complexity of narrative structure increases in both groups in older children, especially regarding the use of adverbs, conjunctions, mental verbs, and referring to consequence. Monolinguals generally achieved higher points in all groups especially in younger children. At macrostructure level, differences between monolingual and bilingual children in referring to initiating event, and internal response are significant. Monolinguals significantly produced longer narratives comparing to bilinguals and the difference is meaningful among children aged 4-4/5. Gender does not show any significant effect on the complexity of the narratives. Among monolinguals, WC and MLU were higher in narratives produced by girls, but among bilinguals it was the opposite. However, gender does not have a significant effect on the length of narratives.
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