Macrostructural Narrative Skills of Monolingual and Simultaneously Bilingual Preschoolers

Abstract

Abstract. This article compares the development of macrostructural narrative skills of monolingual and simultaneously bilingual preschoolers in telling a picture story. It also addresses the connections between macrostructural narrative skills, receptive and productive language skills (LiSe DaZ), and auditory perception and processing skills (HASE). The narrative skills were collected using the Baby Birds picture story of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) and analyzed regarding the macrostructural components of story structure, story complexity, and story comprehension. This contribution includes data from 229 monolingual and 76 simultaneously bilingual children. The comparison of the three age groups (4;6 – 4;11, 5;0 – 5;5, 5;6 – 5;11 years) indicates significant developmental increases in the performance of monolingual children regarding story structure, story complexity, and story comprehension, while no clear age trends are apparent for the simultaneously bilingual children. Correlations are found for the story structure and story comprehension of monolingual and simultaneously bilingual children with individual receptive language skills and language-processing skills.