Cover not available
Part of
Developing Narrative Comprehension: Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives
Edited by Ute Bohnacker and Natalia Gagarina
[Studies in Bilingualism 61] 2020
► pp. 99–148

Bilingual Turkish-Swedish children’s understanding of MAIN picture sequences

Individual variation, age, language and task effects

ORCID logo | Uppsala University
 | Uppsala University
ORCID logo | Uppsala University | Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS)
This study investigates story comprehension in 100 bilingual Turkish-Swedish children aged 4 to 7 years, growing up in Sweden with Turkish as their home language and Swedish as the societal language. Information about language development, exposure and other background factors was obtained via parental questionnaires. In both languages, children told two picture-based stories from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN, Gagarina et al., 2012, 2019) and answered standardised comprehension questions that probe inferencing of goals and emotions of story characters.
Overall comprehension scores and response accuracies to individual questions were calculated. Story comprehension was compared across ages, languages and tasks, and related to performance on Turkish and Swedish vocabulary tasks (Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks, CLT, Haman et al., 2015). A qualitative analysis explored characteristics of the MAIN picture sequences and the type of inference required to score correct on comprehension questions. Overall comprehension scores did not differ between Turkish and Swedish at group level. Comprehension scores increased significantly with age in both languages. This increase was steeper in the majority language Swedish. Younger children (age 4–5) often performed well in Turkish, whilst more older children (age 6–7) performed well in Swedish. In both languages, older children reached relatively high scores, but did not yet master all aspects of inferential story understanding as probed by MAIN. Regression models indicate that a large part of the variance in story comprehension can be explained by age and expressive vocabulary knowledge (CLT) in the respective language. Individual case studies of exceptionally poor story comprehenders vs. high performers also suggest that story comprehension and vocabulary skills are linked, but moreover that MAIN comprehension is influenced by language input and use in and outside the home.
An interesting task effect was found, indicating that the comprehension measure for the MAIN Cat and Dog picture sequences is easier than for Baby Birds/Baby Goats – even when they are administered in the very same mode. The task influenced children’s comprehension performance more than the language of testing did. Turkish and Swedish showed the same overall response patterns, with very high vs. low performance on certain individual questions. We argue that due to subtle differences in the pictorial stimuli, parallel and seemingly identical comprehension questions require inferences with rather different levels of difficulty. Comprehension scores should therefore not be straightforwardly compared across MAIN tasks.
Keywords: inferencing, story comprehension, Swedish, Turkish, vocabulary
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction and background
  • 2.Aim and research questions
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Materials
      • 3.2.1MAIN
      • 3.2.2Vocabulary: CLT
    • 3.3Procedure
    • 3.4Scoring
      • 3.4.1Scoring of the MAIN narrative comprehension questions
      • 3.4.2Scoring of the vocabulary tasks (CLT)
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1MAIN comprehension scores: Differences between languages, tasks and age groups
    • 4.2MAIN comprehension scores: Individual variation
      • 4.2.1Exceptionally low-scoring children
      • 4.2.2Exceptionally high-scoring children
    • 4.3Influence of vocabulary knowledge on MAIN comprehension scores
    • 4.4Performance on individual comprehension questions
      • 4.4.1Response accuracies for individual comprehension questions
      • 4.4.2Exploring individual comprehension questions further
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.61.04boh
References (60)
References
Astington, J. W., & Pelletier, J. (2005). Theory of mind, language, and learning in the early years: Developmental origins of school readiness. In B. D. Homer & C. S. Tamis-LeMonda (Eds.), The development of social cognition and communication (pp. 312–352). New York, NY: Taylor & Francis, ProQuest Ebook Central.Google Scholar
Berman, R. A., & Slobin, D. I. (1994). Narrative structure. Chapter IIA. In R. A. Berman & D. I. Slobin (Eds.), Relating events in narrative: A cross-linguistic developmental study (pp. 39–84). New York, NY: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Bishop, D. V. M. (1997). Uncommon understanding: Development and disorders of language comprehension in children. Hove: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Bishop, D. V. M., & Adams, C. (1992). Comprehension problems in children with specific language impairment: Literal and inferential meaning. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 35(1), 119–129. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boerma, T., Leseman, P., Timmermeister, M., Wijnen, F., & Blom, E. (2016). Narrative abilities of monolingual and bilingual children with and without language impairment: implications for clinical practice. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 51(6), 626–638. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bohnacker, U. (2013–2019). Language impairment or typical language development? Developing methods for linguistic assessment of bilingual children in Sweden. Research project funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR 421-2013-1309), commonly referred to as BiLI-TAS ( Bilingualism, Language Impairment, Turkish, Arabic, Swedish).Google Scholar
(2016). Tell me a story in English or Swedish: Narrative production and comprehension in bilingual preschoolers and first graders. Applied Psycholinguistics, 37(1), 19–48. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2018a). Guidelines for scoring CLT. Uppsala University, Version March 2018 (Unpublished material).Google Scholar
(2018b). Guidelines for scoring macrostructure in MAIN. Uppsala University, Version November 2018 (Unpublished material).Google Scholar
(2020). Bilingual development of Turkish-speaking children in Sweden. In L. Grenoble, P. Lane, & U. Røyneland (Eds.), Linguistic Minorities in Europe Online. Turkish. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bohnacker, U., Lindgren, J., & Öztekin, B. (2016). Turkish- and German-speaking bilingual 4-to-6-year-olds living in Sweden: Effects of age, SES and home language input on vocabulary production. Journal of Home Language Research, 1, 17–41. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bohnacker, U., & Lindgren, J. (in press). MAIN story comprehension: What can we expect of a typically developing child? In S. Armon-Lotem & K. K. Grohmann (Eds.), LITMUS in action: Cross-comparison studies across Europe. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Preprint retrieved from <[URL]> (18 June, 2020).
Boudreau, D. M. (2007). Narrative abilities in children with language impairments. In R. Paul (Ed.), Language disorders from a developmental perspective: Essays in honour of Robin S. Chapman (pp. 331–356). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Boyd, S., & Nauclér, K. (2001). Sociocultural aspects of bilingual narrative development in Sweden. In L. Verhoeven & S. Strömqvist (Eds.), Narrative development in a multilingual context (pp. 129–151). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dickinson, D. K., & Smith, M. W. (1994). Long-term effects of preschool teachers’ book readings on low-income children’s vocabulary and story comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 29(2), 105–122. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dodwell, K., & Bavin, E. L. (2008). Children with specific language impairment: An investigation of their narratives and memory. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 43(2), 201–218. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ellis Weismer, S. (1985). Constructive comprehension abilities exhibited by language-disordered children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 28, 175–184. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dunn, L. M., & Dunn, D. M. (1997). Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test – Third Edition. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service.Google Scholar
Fiani, R., Henry, G., & Prévost, P. (this volume). Narrative comprehension in Lebanese Arabic-French bilingual children. In U. Bohnacker & N. Gagarina (Eds.), Developing narrative comprehension. Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logo
Gagarina, N., Klop, D., Kunnari, S., Tantele, K., Välimaa, T., Balčiūnienė, I., Bohnacker, U., & Walters, J. (2012). MAIN: Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives. ZAS Papers in Linguistics, 56. Berlin: Leibniz Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft.Google Scholar
(2015). Assessment of narrative abilities in bilingual children. In S. Armon-Lotem, J. de Jong, & N. Meir (Eds.), Assessing multilingual children: Disentangling bilingualism from language impairment (pp. 243–276). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gagarina, N., Klop, D., Kunnari, S., Tantele, K., Välimaa, T., Bohnacker, U., & Walters, J. (2019). MAIN: Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives – Revised. ZAS Papers in Linguistics, 63. Berlin: Leibniz Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft.Google Scholar
Haman, E., Łuniewska, M., & Pomiechowska, B. (2015). Designing Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs) for bilingual preschool children. In S. Armon-Lotem, J. de Jong, & N. Meir (Eds.), Assessing multilingual children: Disentangling bilingualism from language impairment (pp. 196–240). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hayward, D., Schneider, P., & Gillam, R. B. (2009). Age and task-related effects on young children’s understanding of a complex picture story. The Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 55(1), 54–72.Google Scholar
Kapalková, S., Polišenská, K., Marková, L., & Fenton, J. (2016). Narrative abilities in early successive bilingual Slovak–English children: A cross-language comparison. Applied Psycholinguistics, 37(1), 145–164. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kintsch, W., & van Dijk, T. (1978). Toward a model of text comprehension and production. Psychological Review, 85, 363–394. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Klop, D., Visser, M., & Oosthuizen, H. (2012). Narrative profiles of 20 bilingual normally developing 6–7 year old South African children. Paper presented at 6th Meeting of COST Action IS0804. Berlin, Germany.
Koivistoinen, J. (2012). Att berätta på ryska och på svenska: Narrativ förmåga som instrument för språklig bedömning av flerspråkiga barn [Storytelling in Russian and Swedish: Narrative ability as a measure of language in multilingual children] (Unpublished M.Sc. thesis). Uppsala University.Google Scholar
Kunnari, S., & Välimaa, T. (this volume). Narrative comprehension in simultaneously bilingual Finnish-Swedish and monolingual Finnish children. In U. Bohnacker & N. Gagarina (Eds.), Developing narrative comprehension. Multilingual assessment instrument for narratives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logo
Lepola, J., Lynch, J., Laakkonen, E., Silvén, M., & Niemi, P. (2012). The role of inference making and other language skills in the development of narrative listening comprehension in 4-6-year-old children. Reading Research Quarterly, 47(3), 259–282. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Letts, C., & Leinonen, E. (2001). Comprehension of inferential meaning in language-impaired and language normal children. International Journal of Language Communication Disorders, 36(3), 307–328. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lindgren, J. (2018). Developing narrative competence: Swedish, Swedish–German and Swedish–Turkish children aged 4–6 (Studia Linguistica Upsaliensia 19). Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.Google Scholar
(2019). Comprehension and production of narrative macrostructure in Swedish: A longitudinal study from age 4 to 7. First Language, 39(4), 412–432. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lindgren, J., & Bohnacker, U. (this volume). Inferential comprehension, age and language: How Swedish-German bilingual preschoolers understand picture-based stories. In U. Bohnacker & N. Gagarina (Eds.), Developing narrative comprehension. Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logo
Lynch, J. S., & van den Broek, P. (2007). Understanding the glue of narrative structure: Children’s on- and off-line inferences about characters’ goals. Cognitive Development, 22, 323–340. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lynch, J. S., van den Broek, P., Kremer, K. E., Kendeou, P., White, M. J., & Lorch, E. P. (2008). The development of narrative comprehension and its relation to other early reading skills. Reading Psychology, 29, 327–365. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mar, R. A. (2004). The neuropsychology of narrative: Story comprehension, story production and their interrelation. Neuropsychologia, 42, 1414–1434. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Maviş, I., Tunçer, M., & Gagarina, N. (2016). Macrostructure components in narrations of Turkish–German bilingual children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 37(1), 69–89. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Otwinowska, A., Mieszkowska, K., Białecka-Pikul, M., Opacki, M., & Haman, E. (2018). Retelling a model story improves the narratives of Polish-English bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. Published online 2 February 2018. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Öztekin, B. (2019). Typical and atypical language development in Turkish-Swedish bilingual children aged 4–7 (Studia Linguistica Upsaliensia 25). Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.Google Scholar
Paris, A. H., & Paris, S. G. (2003). Assessing narrative comprehension in young children. Reading Research Quarterly, 38(1), 36–76. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pavlenko, A. (2009). Narrative analyses. In L. Wei & M. Moyer (Eds.), The Blackwell guide to research methods in bilingualism and multilingualism (pp. 311–325). Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Renfrew, C. E. (1969 [1997]). Bus Story Test: A Test of Narrative Speech (4th ed.). Bicester, Oxon: Winslow Press.Google Scholar
Roch, M., Florit, E., & Levorato, C. (2016). Narrative competence of Italian–English bilingual children between 5 and 7 years. Applied Psycholinguistics, 37(1), 49–67. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rodina, Y. (2017). Narrative abilities of preschool bilingual Norwegian–Russian children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 21(5), 617–635. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sénéchal, M., & LeFevre, J.-A. (2002). Parental involvement in the development of children’s reading skill: A five-year longitudinal study. Child Development, 73(2), 445–460. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shapiro, L. R., & Hudson, J. A. (1991). Tell me a make-believe story: Coherence and cohesion in young children’s picture-elicited narratives. Developmental Psychology, 27(6), 960–974. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stein, N. L., & Glenn, C. G. (1979). An analysis of story comprehension in elementary school children. In R. O. Freedle (Ed.), New directions in discourse processing (pp. 53–120). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Thompson, J. G., & Myers, N. A. (1985). Inferences and recall at ages four and seven. Child Development, 56, 1134–1144. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tompkins, V., Guo, Y., & Justice, L. M. (2013). Inference generation, story comprehension, and language skills in the preschool years. Reading & Writing, 26(3), 403–426. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trabasso, T., & Nickels, M. (1992). The development of goal plans of action in the narration of a picture story. Discourse Processes 15(1): 249–275. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trabasso, T., Secco, T., & van den Broek, P. W. (1984). Causal cohesion and story coherence. In H. Mandl, N. L. Stein, & T. Trabasso (Eds.), Learning and comprehension of text (pp. 83–111). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Trabasso, T., Stein, N., Rodkin, P. C., Park Munger, M., & Baughn, C. R. (1992). Knowledge of goals and plans in the on-line narration of events. Cognitive Development, 7(2), 133–170. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tuller, L. (2015). Clinical use of parental questionnaires in multilingual contexts. In S. Armon-Lotem, J. de Jong, & N. Meir (Eds.), Assessing multilingual children: disentangling bilingualism from language impairment (pp. 301–330). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ukrainetz, T. A., Justice, L. M., Kaderavek, J. N., Eisenberg, S. L., Gillam, R. B., & Harm, H. M. (2005). The development of expressive elaboration in fictional narratives. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 48(6), 1363–1377. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2012). International Standard Classification of Education: ISCED 2011. Montreal, Quebec: UIS.Google Scholar
Van den Broek, P., Kendeou, P., Kremer, K., Lynch, J., Butler, J., White, M., & Lorch, E. P. (2005). Assessment of comprehension abilities in young children. In S. G. Paris, & S. A. Stahl (Eds.), Children’s reading comprehension and assessment (pp. 107–130). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Westerveld, M. F. (2014). Emergent literacy performance across two languages: Assessing four-year-old bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 17(5), 526–543. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Westerveld, M. F., Gillon, G. T., & Boyd, L. (2012). Evaluating the clinical utility of the Profile of Oral Narrative Ability for 4-year-old children. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 14(2), 130–140. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Widaman, K. F. (2006). Chapter 3: Missing data: What to do with or without them. In K. McCartney, M. R. Burchinal, & K. L. Bub (Eds.), Best practices in quantitative methods for developmentalists. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 71(3), Serial No. 285 (pp. 42–64).Google Scholar
Cited by (11)

Cited by 11 other publications

Lindgren, Josefin
2023. Age and task type effects on comprehension and production of narrative macrostructure: storytelling and retelling by Swedish-speaking children aged 6 and 8. Frontiers in Communication 8 DOI logo
Bohnacker, Ute
2022. Turkish heritage families in Sweden: language practices and family language policy. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 43:9 ► pp. 861 ff. DOI logo
Bohnacker, Ute
2023. Sweden’s multilingual language policy through the lens of Turkish-heritage family language practices and beliefs. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2023:283 ► pp. 77 ff. DOI logo
Bohnacker, Ute, Josefin Lindgren & Buket Öztekin
2022. Storytelling in bilingual Turkish-Swedish children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 12:4 ► pp. 413 ff. DOI logo
Bohnacker, Ute & Josefin Lindgren
2021. MAIN story comprehension. In Language Impairment in Multilingual Settings [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 29], ► pp. 13 ff. DOI logo
Bohnacker, Ute & Natalia Gagarina
2020. Cross-linguistic development of narrative comprehension from A to Z. In Developing Narrative Comprehension [Studies in Bilingualism, 61], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Bohnacker, Ute & Birsel Karakoç
2020. Subordination in children acquiring Turkish as a heritage language in Sweden. In Studies in Turkish as a heritage language [Studies in Bilingualism, 60], ► pp. 155 ff. DOI logo
Gagarina, Natalia, Nathalie Topaj & Natalie Sürmeli
2020. Why do you think the boy would be unhappy if he saw what the cat was eating?. In Developing Narrative Comprehension [Studies in Bilingualism, 61], ► pp. 231 ff. DOI logo
Lindgren, Josefin & Ute Bohnacker
2020. Inferential comprehension, age and language. In Developing Narrative Comprehension [Studies in Bilingualism, 61], ► pp. 61 ff. DOI logo
Lindgren, Josefin & Ute Bohnacker
2022. How do age, language, narrative task, language proficiency and exposure affect narrative macrostructure in German-Swedish bilingual children aged 4 to 6?. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 12:4 ► pp. 479 ff. DOI logo
Wehmeier, Carina Marie
2020. Narrative comprehension and its associations with gender and nonverbal cognitive skills in monolingual and bilingual German preschoolers. In Developing Narrative Comprehension [Studies in Bilingualism, 61], ► pp. 269 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 december 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.