Author: Denise Ng
Ng, Denise, 2024 Evaluating narrative-level discourse in two languages in Singaporean English-Mandarin bilingual kindergarten children, Flinders University, College of Nursing and Health Sciences
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The prevalence of language disorders in bilingual children is thought to be similar to that of monolingual children. However, speech and language therapists often do not have sufficient information about the language profiles of bilingual children, nor the tools specific to this population of children to effectively diagnose and provide intervention for language disorders. This can result in over- and under-diagnoses of language disorders, especially in multilingual societies such as Singapore. There are four official languages in Singapore: English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay, and Tamil. Some of these languages have dialects, such as Hokkien. Clinicians in Singapore working with bilingual children face challenges such as a lack of appropriate assessment tools normed on the local population as well as insufficient knowledge about local language and dialect norms and how these children develop language.
Data elicited from narratives via wordless picture books is very helpful in addressing clinical needs. Such narratives are accounts of events and experiences and they are effective diagnostic tools across cultures to assess children’s language abilities. Most research on narrative skills is based on monolingual children, with some data on bilingual and multilingual children beginning to emerge. Currently, the only language assessments normed on Singaporean children are at the word level and sentence level, with a significant gap at the narrative level.
This body of work reports on an extensive investigation of the narrative language skills of Singaporean English-Mandarin bilingual children via secondary data analysis. A total of 36 Singaporean bilingual kindergarten children were sampled and assigned to one of two language dominance groups, English-dominant (EL1CL2) and balanced English-Mandarin based on parental reports of their language proficiency and performance on a receptive and expressive vocabulary task in both languages. Audio samples were elicited from retell and recall tasks in English and Mandarin based on wordless picture books ‘Frog Goes to Dinner’ and ‘One Frog Too Many’ and analysed with Computerised Language ANalysis (CLAN) software. A rich dataset including more than 3000 datapoints was analysed in a variety of ways. Outcome measures included macrostructure and microstructure elements such as story grammar elements, mean length of utterance, lexical diversity, and specific grammatical markers in both languages. The outcome measures were analysed quantitatively with additional qualitative analysis of errors.
Contrary to hypotheses, both language dominance groups performed similarly on various English outcome measures. The balanced bilingual group, as expected, performed better than the EL1CL2 group on some macrostructure and microstructure outcome measures. Both groups demonstrated better performance in English than in Mandarin. The results suggest a trend of Singaporean children becoming increasingly English-dominant. In addition, the study also found some differences between productions from both groups, including the type of errors produced, reflecting the intricate interplay between language dominance, proficiency, and narrative development in bilingual contexts.
This research has direct implications for clinical practice as it informs clinicians about narrative-level skills in Singaporean bilingual children and the changing linguistic landscape of Singapore.
Keywords: Bilingualism, narratives, macrostructure, microstructure, English, Mandarin
Subject: Speech Pathology thesis
Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2024
School: College of Nursing and Health Sciences
Supervisor: Chris Brebner