Appropriate referential choice at re-introduction context in narratives requires integration of varying levels of information, and thus has been claimed to be the locus of transfer in bilinguals. We present a qualitative analysis of Japanese-English bilingual children’s Japanese narratives to elucidate the strong influence of English referential strategy.
Studies on young children’s narratives have shown that selecting appropriate forms to re-introduce a referent is challenging and thus slower in development compared with referent maintenance, as it requires integration of varying levels of factors such as the distance from the prior mention, the ambiguity as well as the pragmatic predictability of the referent (Orsolini et al 1996). Recent studies on bilingual narratives report children using more noun phrases (NPs) in the re-introduction context in null-argument language compared with their monolingual peers (Chen & Lei 2013), a possible indication of structural vulnerability inducing transfer (Hulk & Muller 2000). Little is known, however, about how different conditions affect the referential choice in bilingual and monolingual children in different ways. We adopt Orsolini et al’s (1996) framework to conduct a qualitative analysis of the referential choice in Japanese narratives of Japanese-English bilinguals. Twelve early bilingual teens as well as eight monolingual peers told narratives in Japanese using the wordless picture book Frog, Where are you? (Mayer 1969) as well as a speechless video clip. Linguistic devices children used to re-introduce the topic are compared with those of their monolingual peers in terms of 1) the distance from the prior mention, 2) the ambiguity of the referent, and 3) the pragmatic predictability of the referent to see if bilinguals and monolinguals differ in how they make decisions in referential choice, and if the referent was clear enough for the listener. Preliminary analyses reveal that compared to monolinguals, bilinguals tended to use more NPs regardless of the distance from the prior mention, constantly disambiguate characters and did not rely on the pragmatic predictability of the referent. The results indicate that the bilingual speakers were heavily influenced by the English tendency to be explicit about the referent, exhibiting a listener-friendly style of referential choice.
