Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-qsmjn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T07:34:48.458Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Development of English referring expressions in the narratives of Chinese–English bilinguals*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

LIANG CHEN  and
NING PAN
LIANG CHEN*
Affiliation:
University of Georgia
NING PAN
Affiliation:
University of Georgia
*
Address for correspondence: Liang Chen, Communication Sciences and Special Education, University of Georgia, 542 Aderhold Hall, Athens, GA 30602, USAchen@uga.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper investigates the development of referring expressions in the narratives of children learning English as a second language (L2). Spoken narratives in English were elicited from sixty Chinese-speaking participants at four ages – five, eight, ten, and young adults – using the wordless picture book Frog, where are you? (Mayer, 1969). Narrative analysis focused on the referring expressions that the L2 speakers used to introduce and maintain reference to story characters in the narratives and on the referential appropriateness of those expressions. We then compared the results of this study with other, similar studies on children learning English as a first language (L1) and found both universal and L2-specific patterns in the development of referring expressions in discourse. On the one hand, regardless of whether English is acquired as an L1 or L2, appropriate use of referring expressions in discourse is developed gradually and is influenced by both discourse function (introduction vs. maintenance) and character type (main vs. secondary). On the other hand, L2 children in our study differed from L1 children in previous studies in the development of referential appropriateness in character introduction, the use of pronominals for referent maintenance, and the timeline of the mastery of appropriate forms for referent introductions versus referent maintenance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , October 2009 , pp. 429 - 445
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This research was supported, in part, by a Faculty Research Seed Grant from the University of Georgia Research Foundation (UGARF). We would like to thank John W. Oller, Jr., Katie Coleman, and our research participants, particularly the children and their families for their assistance in the conduct of this research. We also wish to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on previous versions of this paper.

References

Álvarez, E. (2003). Character introduction in two languages: Its development in the stories of a Spanish–English bilingual child age 6;11–10;11. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 227–243.Google Scholar
Bamberg, M. (1987). The acquisition of narratives: Learning to use language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Bavin, E. & Shopen, T. (1985). The development of narrative by Warlpiri children. Berkeley Linguistics Society, 11, 1–13.Google Scholar
Berman, R. (2001). Crosslinguistic perspectives on narrative development. In Verhoeven & Strömqvist (eds.), pp. 419–428.Google Scholar
Berman, R. & Slobin, D. (1994). Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Chen, L. (2007). The acquisition and use of motion event expressions in Mandarin Chinese. Munich: Lincom.Google Scholar
Chen, L. & Oller, J. W. Jr., (2005). High quality sound motion pictures in L2 curricula: Why and how they work. Canadian Modern Language Review, 62 (2), 263–284.Google Scholar
Chen, L. & Oller, J. W. Jr., (2008). The use of passives and alternatives in English by Chinese speakers. In de Knop, S. & de Rycker, T. (eds.), Cognitive approaches to pedagogical grammar: A volume in honor of René Dirven, pp. 385–415. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Gawlitzek-Maiwald, I. & Tracy, R. (1996). Bilingual bootstrapping. Linguistics, 34, 901–926.Google Scholar
Givón, T. (1990). Syntax: A functional-typological introduction (vol. 2). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In Cole, P. & Morgan, J. L. (eds.), Speech acts (Syntax and Semantics 3), pp. 41–58. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Haznedar, B. (1997). L2 acquisition by a Turkish-speaking child: Evidence of L1 influence. In Hughes, E., Hughes, M. & Greenhill, A. (eds.), Proceedings of the 21st Boston University Conference on Language Development, pp. 245–256. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Hickmann, M. (2003). Children's discourse: Person, space and time across languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hickmann, M. & Hendriks, H. (1999). Cohesion and anaphora in children's narratives: A comparison of English, French, German, and Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Child Language, 26, 419–452.Google Scholar
Hickmann, M., Hendriks, H., Roland, F. & Liang, J. (1996). The marking of new information in children's narratives: A comparison of English, French, German, and Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Child Language, 3, 591–610.Google Scholar
Hickmann, M., Kail, M. & Roland, F. (1995). Cohesive anaphoric relations in French: Children's narratives as a function of mutual knowledge. First Language, 15, 277–300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jin, H. (1994). Topic-prominence and subject-prominence in L2 acquisition: Evidence of English-to-Chinese typology transfer. Language Learning, 44, 101–122.Google Scholar
Jisa, H. (2000). Increasing cohesion in narratives: A developmental study of maintaining and reintroducing subjects in French. Linguistics, 38, 591–620.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kail, M. & Hickmann, M. (1992). French children's ability to introduce referents in narratives as a function of mutual knowledge. First Language, 12, 73–94.Google Scholar
Kang, J. (2004). Telling a coherent story in a foreign language: Analysis of Korean EFL learners’ referential strategies in oral narrative discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 36, 1975–1990.Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1981). The grammatical marking of thematic structure in the development of language production. In Deutsch, W. (ed.), The child's construction of language, pp. 121–148. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1985). Language and cognitive processes from a developmental perspective. Language and Cognitive Processes, 1, 61–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Küntay, A. C. (2002). Development of the expression of indefiniteness: Presenting new referents in Turkish picture-series stories. Discourse Processes, 33, 77–101.Google Scholar
Li, C. N. & Thompson, S. A. (1981). Mandarin Chinese: A functional reference grammar. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk (3rd edn., vol. 2): The database. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Mayer, M. (1969). Frog, where are you? New York: Dial Press.Google Scholar
Meisel, J. M. (1990). Two first languages: Early grammatical development in bilingual children. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Oller, J. W. Jr., & Chen, L. (2007). Episodic organization in discourse and valid measurement in the sciences. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 14, 127–144.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rozendaal, M. I. & Baker, A. E. (2008). A cross-linguistic investigation of the acquisition of the pragmatics of indefinite and definite reference in two-year-olds. Journal of Child Language, 35, 773–807.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schneider, P. & Dubé, R. (1997). Effect of pictorial versus oral story presentation on children's use of referring expressions in retell. First Language, 17, 283–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Serratrice, L. (2007). Referential cohesion in the narratives of bilingual English–Italian children and monolingual peers. Journal of Pragmatics, 39, 1058–1087.Google Scholar
Severing, R. & Verhoeven, L. (2001). Bilingual development in Papiamento and Dutch. In Verhoeven & Strömqvist (eds.), pp. 255–276.Google Scholar
Tao, L. & Healy, A. F. (2005). Zero anaphora: Transfer of reference tracking strategies from Chinese to English. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 34, 99–131.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Unsworth, S. (2007). Child L2, adult L2, child L1: Differences and similarities. A study on the acquisition of direct object scrambling in Dutch. Language Acquisition, 14, 215–217. [Dissertation notice].CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Verhoeven, L. (2004). Bilingualism and narrative construction. In Strömqvist, S. & Verhoeven, L. (eds.), Relating events in narrative: Typological and contextual perspectives, pp. 435–454. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Verhoeven, L. & Strömqvist, S. (eds.) (2001). Narrative development in a multilingual context. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Warden, D. A. (1981). Learning to identify referents. British Journal of Psychology, 72, 93–99.Google Scholar
Whong-Barr, M. & Schwartz, B. D. (2002). Morphological and syntactic transfer in child L2 acquisition of the English dative alternation. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 22, 579–616.Google Scholar
Wigglesworth, G. (1990). Children's narrative acquisition: A study of some aspects of reference and anaphora. First Language, 10, 105–25.Google Scholar
Wigglesworth, G. (1997). Children's individual approaches to the organization of narrative. Journal of Child Language, 24, 279–309.Google Scholar
Yip, V. & Matthews, S. (2007). The bilingual child: Early development and language contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar