Fwd: BILINGUAL NARRATIVE ABILITIES

[Barbara Zurer Pearson]

Dear Info-friends,

I hesitate to say it in public (because Ruth
Berman will ask what took me so long in sending
it), but I just today sent my galleys back to
the editor for a chapter on just the topic
Ilaria Berretta asks about.

The book is already on the Multilingual Matters
website for a March 2002 publication.  It is
called Language and Literacy in Bilingual
Children, DK Oller and RE Eilers, Eds.

The book has the results of a large multifactor
study of bilingual children's performance
on a series of standardized and non-standardized
tests that we did in Miami from 1994-1997
(Oller, Pearson, Umbel, Cobo-Lewis, Gathercole,
and Eilers, mostly--and a cast of well, one
thousand, if not "thousands.")

My sole-authored chapter is on narratives, comparing
them to the monolingual controls, and I used "Frog
Where Are You?", which I liken to the "compulsory
routine" for story-telling children around the
world. (It will not be a surprise that my short
answer to Ilaria is that we did not find
interference per se, but also that the answer
is not so short.)

The stories, themselves, are on CHILDES and in
SALT (all 400+ of them).

I think Infochildes members will be most interested
in what we called our "probe" studies: Ginny
Gathercole did a series of grammaticality judgment
experiments with gender, the mass/count distinction,
and that-trace movement in the two languages;
and Kim Oller did a "phonological translation" study,
a form of phonological awareness.  That's not to
say that the factor analysis of the standardized
results is not super interesting, too.

We all look forward to the actual publication, and
the opportunity to get feedback from the wider
community of people working on these topics.

Cheers,
Barbara





>X-From_: info-childes at mail.talkbank.org  Mon Jan 28 12:36:19 2002
>Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2002 17:35:36 +0000
>From: ilaria309 at supereva.it ()
>Subject: BILINGUAL NARRATIVE ABILITIES
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>
>Dear friends,
>I urgently need something ( book titles. articoles, web sites)
>dealing with bilingual-narrative-abilities; how does a language
>interfere with another in the narrative of "Frog where are you?" of
>bilingual children, aged 3-5-9?
>What's the difference between bilingual and monolingual narrative
>abilities?etc
>Thanks a lot
>
>Ilaria Beretta
>Università IULM
>Milan ITALY
>
>-----------------------------------------------------
>
>messaggio inviato con Freemail by superEva
>http://www.supereva.it
>
>-----------------------------------------------------


--
***********************************
Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph.D.
Research Associate, Project Manager
NIH Working Groups on AAE
Dept. of Communication Disorders
Arnold House 117
UMass, Amherst MA 01003

413-545-5023
fax:545-0803

bpearson at comdis.umass.edu
http://www.umass.edu/aae/