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In:Developing Narrative Comprehension: Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives
Edited by Ute Bohnacker and Natalia Gagarina
[Studies in Bilingualism 61] 2020
► pp. 149–170

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Narrative comprehension in simultaneously bilingual Finnish-Swedish and monolingual Finnish children

ORCiD logo with link | University of Oulu, Finland
ORCiD logo with link | University of Oulu, Finland
Published online: 10 December 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.61.05kun
Abstract
We analysed narrative comprehension in 5-to-6-year-old simultaneously bilingual Finnish-Swedish (n = 16) and monolingual Finnish children (n = 16) by using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). We assessed mean total narrative comprehension scores for bilingual children in both of their languages and for monolingual children in Finnish, in both telling and retelling conditions. We compared bilingual and monolingual children’s narrative comprehension in Finnish and analysed the association between comprehension and production. We also analysed the children’s ability to answer different types of comprehension questions (i.e., questions probing goals, internal state terms, and questions requiring both the ability to draw inferences and to explain answers). We found no difference in total narrative comprehension scores for bilingual children between their two languages or between monolingual and bilingual children. This suggests language-independent narrative comprehension. We found no difference in narrative comprehension between telling and retelling and no correlation between narrative comprehension and production. However, we found a clear question type effect. Children performed better on questions probing goals or internal state terms, but questions that required both inferencing and ability to explain answers were very demanding. In conclusion, detailed analysis of narrative comprehension provides knowledge on how children create a coherent understanding of a story and utilise information in the comprehension process.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Procedure and design
    • 2.3Statistical analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Narrative comprehension: Total score on comprehension questions
    • 3.2Associations between narrative comprehension and production
    • 3.3Children’s performance on the different comprehension questions
  • 4.Discussion
    • 4.1Language comparison
    • 4.2Group comparison
    • 4.3Associations between narrative comprehension and production
    • 4.4Task comparison
    • 4.5Comprehension of different macrostructural components
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
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Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Lindgren, Josefin
2023. Age and task type effects on comprehension and production of narrative macrostructure: storytelling and retelling by Swedish-speaking children aged 6 and 8. Frontiers in Communication 8 DOI logo
Bohnacker, Ute & Josefin Lindgren
2021. MAIN story comprehension. In Language Impairment in Multilingual Settings [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 29], ► pp. 13 ff. DOI logo
Bohnacker, Ute, Buket Öztekin & Josefin Lindgren
2020. Bilingual Turkish-Swedish children’s understanding of MAIN picture sequences. In Developing Narrative Comprehension [Studies in Bilingualism, 61], ► pp. 99 ff. DOI logo

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