Narrative style in the two languages of a bilingual child

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis study involves the analysis of a kind of data not often found in the literature: spontaneous story-telling without an audience and therefore free of any direct influence from another person. The stories are told by a bilingual four-year-old, with examples from both English and French. In comparing the data from both languages, it was found that the French narratives contained a much larger percentage of modifiers (adjectives, adverbs and relative clauses) and employed a greater variety of tenses, which were manipulated to highlight various parts of the story. Comparison with data from children's books in the two languages largely supports the interlinguistic differences in the oral data.