Aspects of Narrative Development in English-Japanese Bilingual Children

What is it about?

From a discourse perspective, the paper examines whether, as children grow, their stories in both languages provide increasingly more elements of the adult genre — especially, more setting of the scene, more problem-resolution sequences, and more complex and frequent narrator's comments on the action. Likewise, in terms of the development of discourse markers, the paper examines whether, as they grow, bilingual children show in both languages increasingly coherent time referencing, smoother event sequencing, more adequate/explicit anaphoric reference and, conversely, less ambiguous anaphoric reference. Overall, the paper examines the nature of multi-faceted language development. The paper demonstrates how, through the task of narrating simple stories, bilingual children's cognitive developments are expanding/developing during the school years.

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Why is it important?

The paper focuses on various features of bilingual children's narrative development. From a discourse perspective, the paper examines whether, as children grow, their stories in both languages provide increasingly more elements of the adult genre — especially, more setting of the scene, more problem-resolution sequences, and more complex and frequent narrator's comments on the action. Likewise, in terms of the development of discourse markers, the paper examines whether, as they grow, bilingual children speaking in both languages show increasingly coherent time referencing, smoother event sequencing, more adequate/explicit anaphoric reference and, conversely, less ambiguous anaphoric reference.

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