Josefin Lindgren | Uppsala University | Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS)
This study investigates story comprehension in 100
bilingual Turkish-Swedish children aged 4 to 7 years, growing up in Sweden
with Turkish as their home language and Swedish as the societal language.
Information about language development, exposure and other background
factors was obtained via parental questionnaires. In both languages,
children told two picture-based stories from the Multilingual Assessment
Instrument for Narratives (MAIN, Gagarina et al., 2012, 2019) and answered standardised comprehension questions that
probe inferencing of goals and emotions of story characters.
Overall comprehension scores and response accuracies to
individual questions were calculated. Story comprehension was compared
across ages, languages and tasks, and related to performance on Turkish and
Swedish vocabulary tasks (Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks, CLT, Haman et al., 2015). A qualitative
analysis explored characteristics of the MAIN picture sequences and the type
of inference required to score correct on comprehension questions. Overall
comprehension scores did not differ between Turkish and Swedish at group
level. Comprehension scores increased significantly with age in both
languages. This increase was steeper in the majority language Swedish.
Younger children (age 4–5) often performed well in Turkish, whilst more
older children (age 6–7) performed well in Swedish. In both languages, older
children reached relatively high scores, but did not yet master all aspects
of inferential story understanding as probed by MAIN. Regression models
indicate that a large part of the variance in story comprehension can be
explained by age and expressive vocabulary knowledge (CLT) in the respective
language. Individual case studies of exceptionally poor story comprehenders
vs. high performers also suggest that story comprehension and vocabulary
skills are linked, but moreover that MAIN comprehension is influenced by
language input and use in and outside the home.
An interesting task effect was found, indicating that the
comprehension measure for the MAIN Cat and Dog picture sequences is easier
than for Baby Birds/Baby Goats – even when they are administered in the very
same mode. The task influenced children’s comprehension performance more
than the language of testing did. Turkish and Swedish showed the same
overall response patterns, with very high vs. low performance on certain
individual questions. We argue that due to subtle differences in the
pictorial stimuli, parallel and seemingly identical comprehension questions
require inferences with rather different levels of difficulty. Comprehension
scores should therefore not be straightforwardly compared across MAIN
tasks.
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Cited by (11)
Cited by 11 other publications
Lindgren, Josefin
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