Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 August 2002
Four bilingual speakers of Irish (Gaelic) and English, two men and two women, were audiorecorded as they produced narratives based on pictures from the Mercer Mayer book Frog, where are you? Order of narration was counterbalanced. The narratives were analyzed according to certain features of global and local structure originally identified in Berman and Slobin (1994). Differences within and across narratives emerged in the number of components included, the number of planning components explicitly marked for purpose, the marking of tense and aspect, and the use of extended aspectual categories. These variations were attributed to 1) the order in which the narrative was told (first-told versus second-told versions), 2) the language of the narrative (Irish versus English), and 3) the particular preferences of individual narrators.