Experiment with the images containing a recurring character: bilingual narrative analysis

Abstract

This article analyzes the French-language and Russian-language discourse of bilingual children of different types. The goal consists in examination of specificity of correlation between the name and image in a bilingual discourse, as well as in description of the action depicted on the image. The respondents for this research became the natural bilinguals from mixed Russian-French or Russian families in France. The authorial corpus of Russian-French speech of bilingual children served as the material for this study. The corpus consists of the stories based on stimulus material. The research was conducted individually with each respondent in Russian and French separately. The respondents could select the initial language for conversation (Russian or French). The scientific novelty of this work is defined by the fact that the tradition of studying narrative was applied in the context of analysis of the bilingual French-Russian speech. The author examined the Russian-language and French-language names of characters and objects in different groups, and drew parallels between them. The results demonstrate that the name of a character within the framework of a single language could vary from image to image. At the same time, variability of names of the main character is greater in the Russian-language block. The most frequent name version for the main character in the Russian-language block was the cat, while in the French-language block it was “chat” with the definite or indefinite article. It is notable that initially some respondents had other options (cat, squirrel), but in the process of the experiment, they also changed the name of the character to corresponding to the author's concept of the name of cat. Due to the fact that the respondents were asked to adhere to the selected language, there was very few instances of code switching. However, their presence indicates that the respondents are lacking lexical tools in their weaker language.