Panel Title
SLA: Panel
Studies in Narrative Competence: Bilingual Children Tell the Story in Two Languages
Paper Title
Tense and Narrative Development in the Frog Stories Told by Bilingual Children
Author's Name, E-mail Address and Institution
Emi Fujiyama, emifujiyama@yahoo.com, Thurgood Marshall Academic High School
Abstract
One of the long-standing critical debates in language studies revolves around the relationship between language and thought processes. The linguistic relativity hypothesis (Whorf, 1956) claims that speakers of different languages think differently, and that they do so because of the differences in the languages they speak. The study reported in this paper represents an attempt to combine some aspects of (1) narrative studies and (2) bilingual studies against the background of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Studies of language acquisition and language development have focused increasingly on the structural aspects of narrative discourse. This study specifically examines narratives in Japanese and English spoken by bilingual children in order to determine which of certain language forms and functions are common to the narratives in both languages and which are exclusive to one of the languages used. Forty English-Japanese bilingual children ages six to twelve were asked to narrate a picture story book in both English and Japanese. Based on the analysis of their use of such linguistic devices as verbal functions (tenses, voice, aspect) and nominalization, the study revealed: (1) when comparable verb forms are available in the two languages, bilinguals deploy similar organizational strategies in the use of those forms. (2) when comparable forms are not available or are rarely used in a language, bilinguals access different linguistic systems in their mind and organize their narrations accordingly. Their choices signal that narrators, when speaking different languages, are under the constraints of the language they are using. The form-function mapping differs depending on the language used. The results obtained in this study, which seem to show both shared (possibly universal) and language-specific patterns of development, suggest that children's narratives reflect both their age and the specific language they are using.
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