Description of Pictures by Russian-French Bilingual Children: Lexical and Grammatical Analysis

Abstract

This paper provides an analysis of French and Russian discourse produced by different types of bilingual children. The respondents were asked to describe a set of pictures using Russian and French reflexive and reciprocal verbs, as well as their irreflexive analogues from the other language. The respondents were natural bilinguals that lived in France in Russian-French or Russian families. The research followed the long-existing tradition of bilingual discourse studies via picture description. The check set included twenty-two pictures that featured a cat performing different actions. The speech contained verbs that matched the predicted use, their synonyms, and even other verbal constructions, e.g. passive or infinitive verb forms. Furthermore, children used one-member sentences that consisted of nouns or adverbs. In all cases, the children demonstrated a more advanced level of the French language than that of Russian. This followed from several indicators: lack of Russian comments, amount of incorrect or non-standard comments, and constant switching to French. French interference appeared more pronounced. As for reflexive verbs, the number of errors was insignificant both in Russian and French discourse.