Bilingual Mandarin-English preschoolers’ spoken narrative skills and contributing factors: A remote online story-retell study

• DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.797602
• Publication Date: 2022-10-14T13:28:00Z
• Authors: Jingdan Yang; Jae-Hyun Kim; Outi Tuomainen; Nan Xu Rattanasone
• Keywords: Mandarin Chinese; Spoken Language

This study examined the spoken narrative skills of a group bilingual Mandarin-English speaking 3-6-year-olds (N = 25) in Australia, using remote online story-retell task. Bilingual preschoolers are an understudied population, especially those who typologically distinct languages such as Mandarin and English which have fewer structural overlaps compared to language pairs that closer, reducing cross-linguistic positive transfer. We these preschoolers' measured by macrostructures (the global organization story) microstructures (linguistic structures, e.g., total number utterances, nouns, verbs, phrases, modifiers) across within each language, how various factors age experiences contribute individual variability. The results indicate our acquired similarly their two languages, i.e., showing similar patterns productivity for macrostructure microstructure elements both languages. While chronological was positively correlated with (showing developmental effects), there were no significant correlations between measures (no effects input/output). findings suggest although acquire diverse different learning environments, at home highly educated parents, preschool, they displayed levels oral far macro-/micro-structure concerned. provides further evidence feasibility assessment skills.