Chapter published in:
Developing Narrative Comprehension: Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives
Edited by Ute Bohnacker and Natalia Gagarina
[Studies in Bilingualism 61] 2020
► pp. 31–60

Narrative comprehension in Lebanese Arabic-French bilingual children

| Saint Joseph University of Beirut , Lebanon
| Saint Joseph University of Beirut , Lebanon
| University of Tours, Inserm , France

This chapter examines the development of comprehension of macrostructure in narratives by 48 simultaneous bilingual Lebanese Arabic-French children aged 4–9. Fictional storytelling and narrative comprehension tasks were administered in both languages, using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (Gagarina et al., 2012). The comprehension scores were compared across the two languages and analyzed in relation to age, macrostructure production scores, language dominance, expressive vocabulary, and a composite measure of exposure to stories. The results showed significant age effects on comprehension and no differences between languages, irrespectively of language dominance. Significant correlations were found between comprehension and production scores, between comprehension scores in both languages and exposure to stories in French, and between comprehension and expressive vocabulary. The results suggest that story comprehension is invariant across languages, meaning that a bilingual child carries over narrative abilities across languages even when one language is less dominant than the other. Nonetheless, the results also show that exposure to storytelling affects performance on macrostructure comprehension and that assessment of macrostructure comprehension requiring verbal answers necessitates minimal language proficiency.

Keywords: narratives, macrostructure, comprehension, Lebanese Arabic, French
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Lebanon’s multilingual context and the challenges for language assessment
    • 1.2Development of narrative comprehension
    • 1.3Factors involved in the development of narrative comprehension
  • 2.Objectives
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Materials
    • 3.3Procedures
    • 3.4Narrative measures
      • 3.4.1Comprehension
      • 3.4.2Production
        • 3.4.2.1Story structure
        • 3.4.2.2Structure complexity
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Development of narrative comprehension in Lebanese Arabic and French
    • 4.2Comparison of narrative comprehension in Lebanese Arabic and French
    • 4.3Development of comprehension skills in relation with the development of story structure and story complexity
    • 4.4Development of comprehension skills in relation with language dominance and with exposure to stories
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Development of narrative comprehension in Lebanese Arabic and French
    • 5.2Comparison of comprehension skills of children in both languages
    • 5.3Development of narrative comprehension in relation with production
    • 5.4Development of comprehension skills in relation with language dominance, expressive vocabulary, and exposure to stories
  • 6.Conclusion and clinical implications
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 December 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.61.02fia
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