How oral texts are organized in monolingual and heritage Russian

Abstract

The present study examines narrative macrostructure, measured as Story Structure (SS) and Story Complexity (SC), in bilinguals speaking Russian as their home/heritage language (L1) and exposed to different societal languages (L2), while focusing on the effects of different L2s, bilingualism, and episodic structure and compares it to monolingual Russian. The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) was used to elicit narratives in L1/Russian from 162 L2 Finnish, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, or Swedish bilinguals (4- and 6-year-olds) and 21 monolingual Russian children (4-year-olds). Age-matched bilinguals showed similarity in SS (except for children speaking L2 German or Hebrew) and SC. Monolinguals (age range 50–59 months) outperformed younger bilinguals (age range 48–59 months) in SS and SC but performed similarly to older bilinguals (age range 66–83 months). Fine-grained analysis revealed that a well-formed episode might include an Attempt-Outcome sequence combined with Internal States (and not only Goal-Attempt-Outcome) and that children are sensitive to events depicted in each episode. The findings show some evidence for the universality of macrostructure and provide insight into macrostructural knowledge at the episode level. The results are discussed within the theoretical model of multidimensional text organization.