Narrative skills of Russian heritage children in Cyprus
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2022/13/0024/000566Keywords:
Russian heritage children, Narrative skills, Macrostructure, GrammaticalityAbstract
The present study investigated the narrative skills of 40 Russian heritage children (HL) in Cyprus aged 4;0-6;0, with a focus on macrostructure (story structure, structural complexity, and internal state terms) and grammaticality, that is, the extent to which utterances follow the grammatical rules of a language. Analysis of the data revealed that language proficiency level and mode of narration (telling versus retelling) affected narrative abilities, as measures of proficiency in HL were correlated with macrostructure. The grammaticality analysis revealed that functional categories were the most vulnerable domain for Russian heritage children, which may be due to cross-linguistic interference or developmental and language acquisition patterns in a language-contact setting. The number of errors was correlated with language proficiency measures.
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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
