Bilingual Narrative Development: Analyzing Sentences and Stories Within and Across Languages

Narrative samples provide an ecologically valid measurement of bilingual children's skills at the sentence (microstructure) and story levels (macrostructure). Cross-language transfer of narrative macrostructure would indicate that children can leverage their storytelling skills in one language to support storytelling in the other. A rigorous test of cross-language transfer needs to control for age and within-language microstructure skills.

We analyzed Spanish and English narrative retells produced by 109 typically developing bilingual participants, ages 5 to 7, using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (Gagarina et al., 2019). Microstructure measures included number of different words (NDW) and mean length of utterance in words (MLUw). Macrostructure was measured using the MAIN's goal-attempt-outcome (GAO) complexity rating.

To examine associations between L1 and L2 macrostructure, analyses included bivariate correlations and two hierarchical linear regressions predicting L1 and L2 macrostructure, respectively, with cross-language macrostructure, age, and microstructure measures as predictors.

As anticipated, within-language microstructure contributed to macrostructure, suggesting that microstructure skills like vocabulary (e.g., NDW) are the strongest predictors of storytelling within each language. We also found bidirectional cross-language associations, with L1 macrostructure predicting L2 macrostructure and vice versa, even after controlling for the effects of age, L1 microstructure, and L2 microstructure. These cross-language associations indicate that storytelling may tap into underlying domain-general cognitive mechanisms (e.g., episodic memory and statistical learning).

Few studies have accounted for microstructure and age effects when investigating cross-language transfer of narrative macrostructure in both L1 and L2. This study investigates cross-language transfer of macrostructure (MAIN GAO) while controlling for age and L1 and L2 microstructure (NDW and MLU), which resulted in bidirectional cross-language associations between L1 and L2 macrostructure.

Robust vocabulary skills in the L1 and L2 can support narrative development within each language. Bidirectional cross-language associations in macrostructure suggest that storytelling reflects underlying cognitive mechanisms that are not language-specific.