Narrative Skills in Bilingual Children: The Impact of Shared and Language-specific Skills
Abstract
Despite increasing research on bilingual narratives, it remains unclear whether macrostructure is shared across bilinguals' two languages, how microstructure supports macrostructure within each language, and whether language dominance influences these relations. This study examined cross-language macrostructure, microstructure–macrostructure associations, and the moderating role of language dominance. Participants were 64 Grade 1 (Mage = 7;2 years) Greek–German bilingual children who completed a picture-based narrative task in both languages. Macrostructure was assessed using story structure, while microstructure was measured through total number of words (TNW), lexical diversity (VOC-D), mean length of utterance (MLU), and clausal density (CD). Language dominance was operationalized as relative vocabulary proficiency in Greek and German. Results showed a partial cross-language macrostructure association and significant contributions of microstructure to macrostructure in both languages, with no moderation effects of dominance. TNW emerged as the strongest and most consistent predictor. Findings highlight shared cognitive and language-specific factors supporting narrative macrostructure.