Bilingual Children’s Narrative Comprehension: Do Pauses during Retelling Buy Time for Understanding?

Abstract

This study extended research on bilingual children’s narrative comprehension to text processing during retelling. A cross- and monolinguistic design allowed for the investigation of the association of various aspects of narrative comprehension with two types of pause occurring during oral retelling of a story heard in one language and retold in a second or in the same language. A sample of 95 bilingual (L1 German/L2 English) fourth-graders participated in the experiment. Comprehension was predominantly accomplished during listening, as children with L1 input outperformed children with L2 input, but they did not benefit from L1 in retelling. Children’s comprehension performance and corresponding pause patterns suggested that the duration of filled pauses dedicated to gist formation indicated efficiency of comprehension: The duration decreased with increasing comprehension. The findings allowed the conclusion that longer pauses during retelling did not buy time for comprehension.

Keywords:

• Retelling
• cognitive pause
• childhood bilingualism
• cross-linguistic design

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ute Schönpflug

Ute Schönpflug, PhD., Prof. adj., has served the Research Grant Committee of all universities in Hongkong as panel member and reviewer for the last six years. Currently her own research interests are cognitive development and specifically, the development of text processing in school-aged children.

Lenka Küpping-Faturikova

Lenka Küpping-Faturikova, Dipl. Psych., school psychologist in a public Center for School Psychology financed by the City of Berlin, Germany.