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Part of
Language Acquisition in Romance Languages
Edited by Vicenç Torrens
[Bilingual Processing and Acquisition 18] 2024
► pp. 253–282

Chapter 11
The narrative abilities of Spanish monolinguals and Spanish–Catalan bilinguals with Prader–Willi syndrome

| University of the Balearic Islands
| University of Ottawa | Nebrija University

This study investigates the narrative abilities of seven Spanish monolinguals and six Spanish – Catalan bilinguals with Prader–Willi syndrome. All participants were asked to narrate A boy, a dog, and a frog (Mayer, 1967) in Spanish. Additionally, bilinguals were also asked to narrate Frog, where are you? (Mayer, 1969) in Catalan. Both narrative corpora were analyzed according to their macrostructure (Narrative Scoring System) and microstructure (Mean Length per Utterance and Type-Token Ratio measures). Monolinguals and bilinguals showed similar macrostructural abilities as well as comparable morphosyntactic language development; however, a positive effect of bilingualism was detected when evaluating participants’ lexical variability. Bilingual speakers showed comparable narrative abilities in both Spanish and Catalan.

Keywords: bilingualism, narrative abilities, macrostructure, microstructure, genetic disorders, Prader–Willi syndrome
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The narrative abilities of typically and non-typically developing bilingual individuals
    • 2.1Bilingualism in typically developing individuals
    • 2.2Bilingualism in non-typically developing individuals
  • 3.The linguistic and narrative abilities of the Prader–Willi syndrome population
  • 4.Research questions and hypotheses
  • 5.Methods
    • 5.1Participants
    • 5.2Instruments
    • 5.3Narrative task(s): Procedure, transcription and coding
      • Utterance delimitations
      • Count word conventions
      • Different word conventions
    • 5.4Measures
      • Macrostructural abilities
      • Microstructural abilities
    • 5.5Data analysis
      • Between-group analysis (monolingual vs. bilingual speakers)
      • Within-group analysis (Spanish vs. Catalan among bilingual speakers)
  • 6.Results
    • Results at the macrostructural level
      • Between-group analysis (monolingual vs. bilingual speakers)
      • Within-group analysis (Spanish vs. Catalan among bilingual speakers)
    • Results at the microstructural level
      • Between-group analysis (monolingual vs. bilingual speakers)
      • Within-group analysis (Spanish vs. Catalan among bilingual speakers)
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.Conclusions and limitations of the study
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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