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- Håkansson, Gisela, et al.
(author)
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A case study of a quadrilingual child : The influence of exposure and cognates when developing multiple languages
- 2021
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In: Language Impairment in Multilingual Settings. - Amsterdam : John Benjamins Publishing Company. ; 29, s. 78-97
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper reports on a case study of a quadrilingual child, Stefan, born and raised in Sweden and exposed to four languages before his first birthday: English, French, Russian and Swedish. We examine his vocabularies in these languages by the Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (Haman, Łuniewska, & Pomiechowska, 2015), designed to measure vocabulary in monolingual and multilingual children. Stefan’s scores on comprehension and production reveal proficiency in all his languages, to varying degrees, and with comprehension exceeding production. While highlighting direct and indirect exposure as explanation for the variation in proficiency, we also discuss cognate vocabulary as an important factor for multilingual language development. In the production tasks, Stefan demonstrates not only vocabulary knowledge but also language-specific use of morphosyntax.
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| 2. |
- Bohnacker, Ute, 1969-, et al.
(author)
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MAIN story comprehension : What can we expect of a typically developing child?
- 2021
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In: Language Impairment in Multilingual Settings. - Amsterdam : John Benjamins Publishing Company. - 9789027209795 - 9789027258915 ; , s. 13-46
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This study investigates story comprehension in 124 typically-developing children aged 4-6 growing up in Sweden, using the LITMUS-MAIN (Multilingual Assessment instrument for Narratives, Gagarina et al. 2012). 72 Swedish monolinguals and 52 Swedish-English bilinguals from similar socio-economic backgrounds told two MAIN stories each and answered standardised questions that probe inferencing of goals and emotions of story characters. Overall comprehension scores were calculated per narrative, and responses to individual questions were analysed. Results were compared across age groups, languages, and tasks. Already at age 4, and certainly at age 6, overall comprehension scores were high, indicating good general understanding of the stories. Scores differed significantly between tasks, suggesting that comprehension of MAIN Cat/Dog is easier than Baby Birds/Baby Goats. For both tasks, protagonists’ goals were understood well at age 4, approaching ceiling (>90%) at age 5-6. Internal states as initiating events were also relatively well understood. However, many children struggled to infer emotional reactions of protagonists when this necessitated taking the whole plotline into account. We suggest that the processing abilities of the average 6-year-old are not yet developed enough to master every aspect of inferential understanding probed on the MAIN. Results held across languages and mono-/bilinguals, suggesting that they generalize.
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