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Narrative style in the two languages of a bilingual child*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Sarah N. Dart
Sarah N. Dart*
Affiliation:
University of California at Los Angeles
*
740 Harvard Ave, Claremont, CA 91711, USA.
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Abstract

This study involves the analysis of a kind of data not often found in the literature: spontaneous story-telling without an audience and therefore free of any direct influence from another person. The stories are told by a bilingual four-year-old, with examples from both English and French. In comparing the data from both languages, it was found that the French narratives contained a much larger percentage of modifiers (adjectives, adverbs and relative clauses) and employed a greater variety of tenses, which were manipulated to highlight various parts of the story. Comparison with data from children's books in the two languages largely supports the interlinguistic differences in the oral data.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 1992 , pp. 367 - 387
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Sandra Thompson and René Coppieters for advice and encouragement throughout the preparation of this paper and R. K. S. Macaulay, Katharine Perera, and an anonymous reviewer for valuable comments on the final draft.

References

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