Relationship between oral narrative and vocabulary skills among bilingual language-minority children and their monolingual peers in primary school

Abstract

Aim: This study investigates whether the conditions of bilingual language-minority (BLM) children versus monolingualism have different effects on oral narrative and vocabulary skills in the societal language (SL-Italian) and on the predictive interrelations between the two skills. Methodology: A total of 112 primary school children (44 % BLM L1-Chinese, L2-Italian and 56 % Italian monolinguals) aged 7–11 years ( M age = 113 months, SD = 12.03; 44 girls, 68 boys) performed an oral story-narration task and a vocabulary task. The purpose of the former was to assess the children’s textual (structure, coherence) and language (cohesion, word productivity) competences, while the latter test assessed their ability to define written words by implementing different cognitive-linguistic processes. A parental questionnaire was used to obtain information regarding age, socioeconomic status (SES), and home language exposure. Data analysis: We compared BLM and monolinguals’ lexical competence and oral narrative ability in an independent t-test analysis. We further verified the relationship between the lexical and oral narrative abilities in Spearman bivariate correlations analyses and investigated their interrelations in a stepwise regression model. Age and SES were controlled for. Findings: BLM children fall significantly behind their monolingual peers on textual structure and lexical skills. Meanwhile, their textual and language competences in stories are similar. In the total sample and monolingual group, lexical skills are positively correlated with the text structure. Results of stepwise regression analyses show that lexical skills completely mediate the effect of BLM versus monolingualism on text structure. Originality: Results on school-aged BLM (L1-Chinese, L2-Italian) children’s oral narrative, vocabulary skills, and their relations extend previous research on bilingualism. Significance: The scarce narrative structure in BLM children’s stories is related to limited vocabulary input. High-level textual processing difficulties may result from the high cognitive effort of managing both the choosing of adequate words in L2 and composing an oral story concurrently.