reformulation

[Zaretel at aol.com]

Dear info members,

I am interested in doing research that looks at the instances of reformulation, i.e., substitutions-rewordings, during story retelling.  It is known that in the course of language acquisition children use these transformations that have an effect of a change in the original expression and are believed to constitute children's productive abilities.

It is also assumed that across languages there should be differences in the way children reformulate because of the differences in the interrelations between grammar and lexicon of a given language.

I am using bilingual Russian-English speakers in retelling the same story in different languages (Boston group), as well as Russian monolingual children who are retelling the same story in Russian only (Moscow cohort).  The idea is to see if there is enough inherent structures in Russian that allow children who speak this language, as well as using an additional language retell in the same manner as monolinguals.

Apparently, there isn't that much literature that addresses the issue of reformulation because it is relatively late stage of language acquisition.
I have a work by C. Martinot, who's design I am using for my study, "Etude comparative des processus de reformulations chez desenfants de 5 a 11 ans", but not much else.
Any suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

I can be reached at zaretel at aol.com, or elezar at bu.edu

Thank you all in advance,
Elena Zaretsky
BU Department of Psychology