Cover not available
Part of
Language Impairment in Multilingual Settings: LITMUS in action across Europe
Edited by Sharon Armon-Lotem and Kleanthes K. Grohmann
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 29] 2021
► pp. 47–76

How oral texts are organized in monolingual and heritage Russian

Evidence from six countries

| Leibniz-Center for General Linguistics (ZAS)
| Bar Ilan University
| Russian Academy of Sciences
| University of Helsinki
| Stockholm University
| UiT The Arctic University of Norway
The present study examines narrative macrostructure, measured as Story Structure (SS) and Story Complexity (SC), in bilinguals speaking Russian as their home/heritage language (L1) and exposed to different societal languages (L2), while focusing on the effects of different L2s, bilingualism, and episodic structure and compares it to monolingual Russian. The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) was used to elicit narratives in L1/Russian from 162 L2 Finnish, German, Hebrew, Norwegian, or Swedish bilinguals (4- and 6-year-olds) and 21 monolingual Russian children (4-year-olds). Age-matched bilinguals showed similarity in SS (except for children speaking L2 German or Hebrew) and SC. Monolinguals (age range 50–59 months) outperformed younger bilinguals (age range 48–59 months) in SS and SC but performed similarly to older bilinguals (age range 66–83 months). Fine-grained analysis revealed that a well-formed episode might include an Attempt-Outcome sequence combined with Internal States (and not only Goal-Attempt-Outcome) and that children are sensitive to events depicted in each episode. The findings show some evidence for the universality of macrostructure and provide insight into macrostructural knowledge at the episode level. The results are discussed within the theoretical model of multidimensional text organization.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Story grammar and the development of the narrative macrostructure
    • 2.1Story grammar models
    • 2.2Assessment of macrostructure using LITMUS-MAIN
    • 2.3Story Structure and Story Complexity as the constituents of story grammar
  • 3.The study
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Materials
    • 4.3Procedure
    • 4.4Transcription and coding
    • 4.5Analysis
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Story structure
    • 5.2Story complexity
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Bilinguals vs. monolinguals
    • 6.2Episodic structure
  • 7.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 18 November 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.29.02gag
References (71)
References
Aleshkovski, I., Grebenyuk, A., & Vorobyeva, O. (2018). The evolution of Russian emigration in the post-Soviet period. Social Evolution & History, 17(2), 140–155. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Altman, C., Armon-Lotem, S., Fichman, S., & Walters, J. (2016). Macrostructure, microstructure, and mental state terms in the narratives of English–Hebrew bilingual preschool children with and without specific language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics, 37(1), 165–193. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Amit, K. (2010). Determinants of life satisfaction among immigrants from Western countries and from the FSU in Israel‏. Social Indicators Research, 96(3), 515–534. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Arefiev, A. L. (2017). Actual state and the tendencies of spread of the Russian in the world. Scholarly publications, G. V. Osipov (Ed.). The Institute of Socio-Political Research RAS.Google Scholar
Armon-Lotem, S., de Jong, J., & Meir, N. (Eds.). (2015). Assessing multilingual children: Disentangling bilingualism from language impairment. Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Armon-Lotem, S., Walters, J., & Gagarina, N. (2011). The impact of internal and external factors on linguistic performance in the home language and in L2 among Russian-Hebrew and Russian-German preschool children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1(3), 291–317. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Berman, R. A. (1995). Narrative competence and storytelling performance: How children tell stories in different contexts. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 5(4), 285–313. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Berman, R. A., & Slobin, D. I. (Eds.). (1994). Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Bohnacker, U. (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
Bohnacker, U., & Gagarina, N. (Eds.). (2020). Developing narrative comprehension: Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (Studies in Bilingualism 61). John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brown, D. (2007). Young children’s use of causal connections during storytelling: The role of context and individual differences in attention (Unpublished PhD dissertation). University of Louisville.Google Scholar
Fichman, S., Altman, C., Voloskovich, A., Armon-Lotem, S., & Walters, J. (2017). Story grammar elements and causal relations in the narratives of Russian-Hebrew bilingual children with SLI and typical language development. Journal of Communication Disorders 69, 72–93. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fiestas, C. E., & Peña, E. D. (2004). Narrative discourse in bilingual children: Language and task effects. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 35(2), 155–168. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gagarina, N. (2016). Narratives of Russian–German preschool and primary school bilinguals: Rasskaz and Erzaehlung. Applied Psycholinguistics, 37(1), 91–122. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gagarina, N., Armon-Lotem, S., Altman, C., Burstein-Feldman, Z., Klassert, A., Topaj, N., Golcher, F., & Walters, J. (2014). Age, input quantity and their effect on linguistic performance in the home and societal language among Russian-German and Russian-Hebrew preschool children. In R. K. Silbereisen, P. F. Titzmann, & Y. Shavit (Eds.), The challenges of diaspora migration. Interdisciplinary perspectives on Israel and Germany (pp. 63–82). Ashgate.Google Scholar
Gagarina, N., Bohnacker, U., & Lindgren, J. (2019). Macrostructural organization of adults’ oral narrative texts. ZAS Papers in Linguistics, 62, 190–208. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gagarina, N., Klassert, A., & Topaj, N. (2010). Sprachstandstest Russisch für mehrsprachige Kinder/Russian language proficiency test for multilingual children. ZAS Papers in Linguistics, 54. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
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.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). Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gagarina, N., Lomako, J., Stadtmiller, E., & Lindner, K. (2020). Text organization in typically developing bilinguals and bilinguals at risk of DLD: what is different and how language independent is it? In N. Gagarina & R. Musan (Eds.), Referential and relational discourse coherence in adults and children (pp. 85–104). Berlin: De Gruyter. 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. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gagné, A., & Crago, M. (2010). The use of the ENNI to assess story grammar competency of school-aged French speaking children with and without specific language impairment. Canadian Journal of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology, 34(4), 231–245.Google Scholar
Galkina, E., Ringblom, N., Krasnoshchekova, S., & Rogozhkina, G. (2017). Acquiring gender and case in Russian: Russian-Dutch, Russian-Swedish and Russian-Azerbaijani bilingual children compared with their monolingual peers with and without SLI and adult learners of Russian as a foreign language. Poster presented at 14th International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Lyon, France.
Gillam, S. L., Gillam, R. B., & Reece, K. (2012). Language outcomes of contextualized and decontextualized language intervention: Results of an early efficacy study. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 43(3), 276–291. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Glück, C. W. (2011). WWT 6–10, Wortschatz- und Wortfindungstest für 6- bis 10-Jährige (2nd ed.). Elsevier.Google Scholar
Goralnik, E. (1995). Goralnik Diagnostic Test. Matan.Google Scholar
Graesser, A. C., Singer, M., & Trabasso, T. (1994). Constructing inferences during narrative text comprehension. Psychological Review, 101(3), 371–395. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gutiérrez-Clellen, V. F. (2002). Narratives in two languages: Assessing performance of bilingual children. Linguistics and Education, 13(2), 175–197. DOI logoGoogle 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). Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hayward, D., & Schneider, P. (2000). Effectiveness of teaching story grammar knowledge to preschool children with language impairment: An exploratory study. Child Language Teaching and Therapy, 16(3), 255–284. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Iluz-Cohen, P., & Walters, J. (2012). Telling stories in two languages: Narratives of bilingual preschool children with typical and impaired language. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15(1), 58–74. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kangasaho, E. (2013). Razvitie narrativnyh sposobnostej u dvujazyčnyh detej doškol’nogo vozrasta [The development of narrative abilities in preschool bilinguals] (Unpublished MA thesis). University of Helsinki.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
Kauschke, C., & Siegmüller, J. (2009). Patholinguistische Diagnostik bei Sprachentwicklungsstörungen (PDSS) (2nd ed.). Elsevier.Google Scholar
Kemper, S. (1984). The development of narrative skills: Explanations and entertainments. In S. A. Kuczaj (Ed.), Discourse development: Progress in cognitive development research (pp. 99–124). Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Khan, K. S., Gugiu, M. R., Justice, L. M., Bowles, R. P., Skibbe, L. E., & Piasta, S. B. (2016). Age-related progressions in story structure in young children’s narratives. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 59(6), 1395–1408. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kunnari, S., Välimaa, T., & Laukkanen-Nevala, P. (2016). Macrostructure in the narratives of monolingual Finnish and bilingual Finnish–Swedish children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 37(1), 123–144. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk (3rd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mandler, J. M., & Johnson, N. S. (1977). Remembrance of things parsed: Story structure and recall. Cognitive Psychology, 9(1), 111–151. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Norbury, C. F., & Bishop, D. V. M. (2003). Narrative skills of children with communication impairments. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 38(3), 287–313. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Parkvall, M. (2016). Sveriges språk i siffror: Vilka språk talas och av hur många? Morfem & Språkrådet.Google Scholar
Paul, R., & Norbury, C. F. (2012). Language disorders from infancy through adolescence (4th ed.). Elsevier.Google Scholar
Pearson, B. Z. (2002). Narrative competence among monolingual and bilingual school children in Miami. In D. K. Oller & R. E. Eilers (Eds.), Language and literacy in bilingual children (pp. 135–174). Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pesco, D., & Kay-Raining Bird, E. (2016). Perspectives on bilingual children’s narratives elicited with the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives. Applied Psycholinguistics, 37(1), 1–9. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Peterson, C., & McCabe, A. (1983). Developmental psycholinguistics: Three ways of looking at a child’s narrative. Plenum. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(1991). Linking children’s connective use and narrative macrostructure. In A. McCabe & C. Peterson (Eds.), Developing narrative structure (pp. 29–53). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Protassova, E., Petrovskaja, V., & Ovchinnikov, A. (2011). Opisanie kartinok finsko-russkimi bilingvami. In S. N. Ceytlin & M. B. Eliseeva (Eds.), Put’ v Jazyk: Odnojazychie i Dvujazychie (pp. 282–293). Jazyki Slavjanskix Kul’tur.Google Scholar
Remennick, L. (2003). A case study in transnationalism: Russian Jewish immigrants in Israel of the 1990s. In R. Münz & R. Ohliger (Eds.), Diasporas and ethnic migrants: Germany, Israel, and post-Soviet successor states in comparative perspective (pp. 370–384). Frank Cass.Google Scholar
Rezzonico, S., Chen, X., Cleave, P. L., Greenberg, J., Hipfner-Boucher, K., Johnson, C. J., Milburn, T., Pelletier, J., Weitzman, E., & Girolametto, L. (2015). Oral narratives in monolingual and bilingual preschoolers with SLI. International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, 50(6), 830–841. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ringblom, N., Håkansson, G., & Lindgren, J. (2014). Cross-linguistic lexical tasks: Swedish version (CLT-SWE) (Unpublished material).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
Ruberg, T. (2013). Problembereiche im kindlichen Zweitspracherwerb. Sprache · Stimme · Gehör, 37(4), 181–185. 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
Simon-Cereijido, G., & Gutierrez-Clellen, V. F. (2009). A cross-linguistic and bilingual evaluation of the interdependence between lexical and grammatical domains. Applied Psycholinguistics, 30(2), 315–337. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Squires, K. E., Lugo-Neris, M. J., Pena, E. D., Bedore, L. M., Bohman, T. M., & Gillam, R. B. (2014). Story retelling by bilingual children with language impairments and typically developing controls. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders 49(1), 60–74. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Statistics Finland (2017). Population 31.12.2016 by Region, Language, Age, Sex and Year. Statistics Finland’s PX-Web databases. Retrieved from [URL]
Statistics Norway (2017). Available online at: [URL]
Stein, N. L., & Glenn, C. G. (1979). An analysis of story comprehension in elementary school children. In R. O. Freedle (Ed.), Discourse processing: Multidisciplinary perspectives (pp. 53–120). Ablex.Google Scholar
Trabasso, T., & Nickels, M. (1992). The development of goal plans of action in the narration of a picture story. Discourse Processes, 15(3), 249–275. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trabasso, T., & Rodkin, P. C. (1994). Knowledge of goal/plans: A conceptual basis for narrating Frog, where are you? In R. A. Berman & D. I. Slobin (Eds.), Relating events in narrative: A cross-linguistic developmental study (pp. 85–106). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Trabasso, T., Stein, N. L., Rodkin, P. C., Munger, M. P., & Baughn, C. R. (1992). Knowledge of goals and plans in the on-line narration of events. Cognitive Development, 7, 133–170. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trabasso, T., & van den Broek, P. (1985). Causal thinking and the representation of narrative events. Journal of Memory and Language, 24(5), 612–630. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trabasso, T., van den Broek, P., & Suh, S. Y. (1989). Logical necessity and transitivity of causal relations in stories. Discourse Processes, 12(1), 1–25. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Verhoeven, L., & Strömqvist, S. (Eds.). (2001). Narrative development in a multilingual context (Studies in Bilingualism 23). John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Walters, J., Armon-Lotem, S., Altman, C., Topaj, N., & Gagarina, N. (2014). Language proficiency and social identity in Russian-Hebrew and Russian-German preschool children. In R. K. Silbereisen, P. F. Titzmann, & Y. Shavit (Eds.), The challenges of diaspora migration: Interdisciplinary perspectives on Israel and Germany. Ashgate.Google Scholar
Warnick, B., & Manusov, V. (2000). The organization of justificatory discourse in interaction: A comparison within and across cultures. Argumentation, 14, 381–404. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Westby, C. E. (1995). Culture and literacy: Frameworks for understanding. Topics in Language Disorders, 16(1), 50–66. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2005). Assessing and facilitating text comprehension problems. In H. Catts & A. Kamhi (Eds.), Language and reading disabilities (2nd ed., pp. 157–232). Allyn & Bacon.Google Scholar
(2012). Perspectives on assessing and improving reading comprehension. In A. G. Kamhi & H. W. Catts (Eds.), Language and reading disabilities (3rd ed., pp. 163–225). Pearson.Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Rodina, Yulia, Alexandra Bogoyavlenskaya, Natalia Mitrofanova & Marit Westergaard
2023. Russian heritage language development in narrative contexts: Evidence from pre- and primary-school children in Norway, Germany, and the UK. Frontiers in Psychology 14 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 september 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.