Space in the Oral Narratives of Monolingual and Bilingual Preschoolers
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15291/magistra.4655Keywords:
bilingualism, Croatian language, monolingualism, preschoolers, spatial relationsAbstract
Children acquire the basics of their mother tongue between the ages of three and four, and by the time they start school, they must develop spatial orientation, i.e., they must be able to name spatial relationships. At the same time, the ability to meaningfully tell or retell a shorter sequence of events also develops. Although the same patterns of language acquisition are recognized in all children, the speech and language development of monolingual and bilingual children may differ. Bilingual children sometimes possess a different level of linguistic knowledge of the languages they acquire at the same time. Compared to monolingual children, they typically know fewer words in each of their languages. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to determine the linguistic specificities of monolingual and bilingual preschoolers in expressing spatial relations. To achieve this, transcribed samples of the spoken language of Croatian preschoolers from the CHILDES corpus were analyzed. The samples were collected using the Croatian version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), which was translated and adapted by Hržica and Kuvač Kraljević (2020). From the corpus, which contains 143 transcribed samples of speech production (narrations based on a picture template) of subjects aged 5 to 63, samples of about 70 monolingual and bilingual children of both sexes, aged 5.1 to 6.11, were selected. All bilingual children live in a bilingual environment and speak Croatian and Italian. The MAIN contains four parallel stories, but for the purposes of this paper, the narration samples of two stories (Baby Birds and Baby Goats) were selected. All selected transcripts were transcribed and marked (male or female; monolingual or bilingual). The linguistic specificities of monolingual and bilingual preschoolers were described based on an analysis of the representation of parts of speech, adjectives, prepositional case expressions, the use and representation verbs of movement, etc. The results between the groups (girls – boys, monolingual – bilingual children) were also compared.
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