Comparing Narrative Microstructures between Bilingual Balochi-Persian Preschoolers and Monolingual Persian Preschoolers

Background: With the rapid increase of bilingual children, more attention is needed on different patterns of their narratives. The aim of this study was to compare levels of narrative microstructures generated by typical developing kindergarten children who were bilingual in Persian and Balochi with their monolingual Persian-speaking counterparts. Methods: A total number of 30 Persian-speaking monolingual children and 13 available bilingual children (aged 48 months old) participated in this study. Their storytelling was audio-recorded and analyzed using Persian-NAP (Narrative Assessment Protocol) guidelines. Results: None of the NAP indicators (including group structure, phrase structure, modifiers, noun, and verbs) showed any significant difference between monolingual and bilingual children (0.06≤P≤0.5). Conclusion: We did not find different performances in the five NAP indicators between bilingual and monolingual children. It may be suggested that different patterns of creating phrases and sentences in the two languages do not affect grammatical use in the second language. 2017© The Authors. Published by JRSR. All rights reserved. *Corresponding author: Maryam Arabpour Dahouie, Department of speech and language pathology, faculty of rehabilitation, Zahedan University of medical sciences, Zahedan, Iran. Tel: +98 936 3658371 E-mail: arabpour_m68@yahoo.com Introduction In recent times, assessment of oral narrative skills can provide valid information about the language ability of children [1]. Making narratives help children to represent past ideas and actions in memory, as well as to evaluate present experiences. During the sharing of narratives, children bond through their linguistic, emotional, and social abilities to make sense of the world [2, 3]. Narrative productions by children are typically retold or generated sentences of fictional events and real or personal events, which can be evaluated at two levels (microstructure and macrostructure) [1, 4]. Microstructure measurements focus on evaluating syntactic features of narrative samples. Grammatical factors like word diversity and frequency, mean length of utterance (MLU), and sentence level complexity are checked at this level, determining the presence of syntactic, morphological, and lexical structures [5]. Macrostructure level considers the overall quality and structure of the oral narrative. Macrostructure of a narrative includes general story, grammar, and elements such as setting, character, initiating event, internal response, and plot. The narrative macrostructure may Journal of Rehabilitation Sciences and Research Journal Home Page: jrsr.sums. ac.ir Arabpour Dahouie M et al. JRSR. 2017;4(2) 37 show a child’s ability to use or understand causal, temporal, and emotional relations, as well as event representations and evaluative devices. Findings showed that narrative skills of children progress with age and the greatest growth occurs in preschool years. Retelling of wordless picture books by children showed a similar developmental pattern. Before the age of three, narratives lack overall cohesion and cannot be followed easily. By the age of four or five, stories are more organized and complete. For example, children learn to use causal relationships in their narratives through words like “but”, “because”, and “so”. Development of narrative skills continue till the school-going age [6]. In this study, children aged four were selected because at this age they can provide more complete and coherent narratives; since between the ages of three and four children become increasingly competent narrators [6]. Oral Narratives of Bilingual Children Children who acquire two languages at home or learn a new language outside (for instance, at school) are called bilingual [7]. For a number of reasons, narrative assessment of bilingual children and understanding their abilities is interesting. First, as countries become more modern and developed, the number of bilingual children increase. Nowadays, in any ethnicity, most children should learn English as a universal language. Maybe, all suburban people should learn the standard language of their country in addition to their native language in order to make relationships more effective. This can be a challenging domain for those learning a second language [8]. Second, oral narrative assessment can provide a rich source on how children use language in natural contexts [9, 10] and is an ecologically valid way of assessing communicative competence [8]. Third, clinicians should be able to distinguish between disorders and differences [11]. Thus, we should know if there are some differences between oral language skills of monolingual and bilingual children, especially in narrations. As researchers suggested in 1980, basic narrative structure is universal; however, there are some differences in the overall macro and microstructures of narratives of children from different cultures. For example, at the macrostructure level, personal narratives of East Asian children are shorter than European children [9, 12, 13]; also, European and American children share multiple episodes about one experience, focusing on the main one, while Japanese children share a few isolated events [13]. Narrative microstructure level is affected by the structure of a child’s native language. Every language has its own structure, which may influence narrative construction [6]. For example, the amount and types of adjectives, adverbs, verbs, and tenses vary in different languages, and in every language, the narrator should use these structures to make a well-organized narrative. This discrepancy may impact narrative structure and content, and create variations between narratives [7, 14]. Despite these cultural and linguistic variations, no studies have sought to document the narrative skills of bilingual children in Iranian bilingual People (nations). Iran is a multicultural country with at least five bilingual people (nations) that include Kurdish, Turkish, Baloch, Arabic, and Armenian. Persian is the official language of Iran [15-17]. Balochi is spoken by almost seven million people. Most of these people live in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, India, Turkmenistan, and even in East African and Arabic countries. Balochi has both spoken and written form. In all these countries, Balochi is not the official language and is not used in educational systems [16]. Therefore, all Baloch children need to use another language when they start school. Purpose Since critical development of narrative skills occurs in the preschool years [18], this study considered some narrative microstructure features of bilingual BalochiPersian children aged four. The main purpose of this article was to compare the narrative microstructure level of bilingual Balochi-Persian children (in Persian) with their monolingual Persian-speaking counterparts within the five indicators of NAP.