Anaphoric pronominal reference in Russian and German narratives: bilingual and monolingual settings

Abstract

Abstract The study compares the rate and type of the anaphoric pronominalisation in narratives produced by adults, by monolingual and by consecutive and simultaneous bilingual five-year-old children. In particular, it addresses the question which types of pronouns children use to refer to previously introduced antecedents and which syntactic role these antecedent NPs exhibit. Results show that consecutive bilinguals show a lower pronominalisation rate as compared to the narratives of monolingual German-speaking children and to their own Russian narratives. These findings are discussed within the construction-based model of language acquisition (Tomasello 2003). Language-specific organisation of the pronominal systems as well as the language-specific structural features are argued to have an impact on the pronominalisation rate in discourse.