Linguistic competence of five and six year olds: Analysis of narrative samples of Russian, English and Russian-English bilingual speakers .

摘要

To what extent do children developing bilingually show similar grammatical development to their monolingual peers? This study considers overall grammatical development in Russian and English for Russian and English monolingual children and bilingual children at entry to school. The Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) was revised and piloted in preparation for this cross-linguistic project. The study evaluates the utility of the revised IPSyn and its potential for studying larger samples of children.;The main question of the study is whether bilingual speakers, exposed to both languages from an early age, are as competent users of their two languages as are their peers who speak a single language at the time they are entering school. The results indicated that statistically, there was no difference between the monolingual and bilingual speakers in their common language as measured by the IPSyn proportionate scores. When examining various categories in the IPSyn measure, the comparison results indicated that in general, bilingual children, as a group, perform as well, and in some categories, better that the monolingual children in either language. The results of the analysis of mixed utterances indicated that bilingual children, overall, were very careful to speak in a language requested to be spoken during storytelling. Most of the instances of mixing came from one child, Vera, when she was engaged in telling the story in English (22.45%). The few instances of mixing produced by other bilingual children were predominantly utterances where the nouns in a different language were inserted.;The current study offers a new way to examine grammatical competencies in English and Russian monolingual and Russian-English bilingual five year olds. The proposed assessment methodology can be useful in tracing the micro-development of language in the ages between 5 and 7 leading to better understanding of the linguistic skills and knowledge children acquire at that age.