Beyond Monolingual Norms: Analyzing the Complexity of Greek-Turkish Bilingual Children’s Written Narratives

This research explores the written narratives of Greek-Turkish bilingual and Greek monolingual children, focusing on their retelling abilities. We analyze both the macrostructure and microstructure of their narratives, utilizing the story-grammar model for the macrostructure analysis and examining lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, spelling accuracy, connectives, and word stressing for the microstructure assessment. We also examine correlations with contextual factors, including home and schooling input. Thirty-six children, comprising an equal number of bilinguals and monolinguals, participate in a picture narrative task (retelling mode). Our findings indicate that while bilingual children exhibit proficiency in constructing the story-grammar comparable to their monolingual counterparts, notable differences emerge in the microstructure of their narratives. Specifically, bilingual children produce shorter narratives. They also demonstrate lower lexical and noun diversity, syntactic complexity, and spelling accuracy (in inflectional suffixes) compared to monolingual children. These observed differences in the microstructure imply a potential trade-off between establishing the core story schema and elaborating on narrative details in bilingual narratives. Additionally, our study identifies early literacy practices (i.e., print exposure in preschool years) and current literacy practices (literacy habits outside the school setting) as predicting differently aspects of the microstructure in each group, further enhancing our understanding of how bilingualism influences narrative development. This underscores the importance of examining both the macrostructure, microstructure, and contextual factors for a comprehensive understanding of narrative development in bilingual and monolingual children.