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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 802

Part of Session 188: Relating the Productions of Multilingual Children and Adolescents in their Languages (Other abstracts in this session)

Cross-linguistic Variation in the Acquisition and Use of Discourse Markers among Russian-Hebrew Preschool Children

Authors: Meir, Natalia; Armon-Lotem, Sharon; Walters, Joel
Submitted by: Walters, Joel (Bar-Ilan University, Israel)

The study reports on cross-linguistic variation in the use of three types of discourse markers in the framework of narrative production. In particular, we examined the order of acquisition of Discourse Connectors (DCs), Fluency Markers (FMs) and Pragmatic Markers (PMs) and their linguistic variants. Discourse markers allow entry to three aspects of children`s knowledge. DCs reflect temporal sequencing of events and their hierarchical elaboration. FMs show children’s abilities to manage communication flow in L1 and L2. And PMs afford insight to intentions and sensitivity to the listener.

Fifty-four children ages 4;4-7;0 (mean age 5;7) from Russian speaking homes and Hebrew- speaking preschools participated. All were second generation immigrant sequential bilinguals from cities in central Israel. Six narratives were elicited from each child using picture book stimuli (two familiar narratives “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and one unfamiliar narrative: “Cat” (Hickmann 2003) and “Fox” (Gulzow & Gagarina 2007). Children`s narratives were audio-recorded and transcribed using CHILDES (MacWhinney 2000). Findings will be reported for acquisition of DMs and cross-linguistic variation in their use. Sociolinguistic data were collected via parent interviews and included information about parents’ education and occupations, motivations for immigration, perceptions of their children’s ethnolinguistic identities and likelihood of social integration.

Results show that children initially acquire text-structuring DCs, with FMs and PMs appearing later. DCs were produced by all children in both languages. The most frequent DCs used were: i ‘and’ a ‘and/but’, a potom ‘and then’ in Russian and ve ‘and’ axar-kax ‘and then’, ve az ‘and so’ in Hebrew. FMs were used by 85.2% of the children in L1/Russian and by 68.5% in L2/Hebrew, with uh, eta ‘this’ emerging as most frequent in Russian and uh, um as most frequent in Hebrew. A similar cross-linguistic pattern emerged for PMs (88.9% in L1/Russian and 77.8% in L2/Hebrew) with uzhe ‘already’ and tozhe ‘too’ showing the highest frequencies in Russian and kvar ‘still’ and gam ‘also’ in Hebrew.

Findings for DC acquisition conform with Bloom et al.’s (1980) acquisition pattern for monolingual English-speaking children: Additive < Temporal < Causal < Adversative. In both languages, appropriate use of temporals was documented, but use of causals and adversatives was lower in both L1 and L2.

The most salient cross-linguistic differences emerged from an analysis of the density of discourse markers (DM), where density was defined as a percentage of word tokens. DM density was observed to be significantly higher in L1/Russian in comparison with L2/Hebrew for all three types of DMs. This cross-linguistic difference in the density of DMs between L1 and L2 is attributed to production difficulties in L1 (Fiesta et al. 2005) rather than pragmatic shifting in language dominance reported for adult bilingual discourse (Sankoff et al.1997; Matras 2000; Muller 2005; Buysse 2010).