| Vortragende(r) | Irina A. Sekerina |
| Institution(en) | City University of New York |
| Datum | 26.06.2025, 15:00 - 16:00 Uhr |
| Uhrzeit | 15:00 Uhr |
| Ort | ZAS, Pariser Str. 1, Seminarraum 1.02 |
The present talk consists of two separate investigations of MAIN narrative production in bilinguals: (1) a pilot meta-analysis (children) and (2) investigation of narrative characteristics of older heritage speakers.
(1) The meta-analysis evaluates whether the Story Structure component (macrostructure MAIN measures language-independent narrative abilities in bilingual children. Data from 12 published studies comprising 691 children were analyzed, comparing scores from first (L1) and second (L2) languages using standardized mean change calculations. Results revealed no significant differences between L1 and L2 scores, nor any effect of age, suggesting that narrative macrostructure develops in parallel across languages. Moderate heterogeneity was found, but no publication bias was detected. These findings support the validity of Story Structure as a language-general metric for assessing bilingual narrative skills.
(2) The investigation of narrative production skills was conducted with 32 older bilingual Brazilian-Portuguese-heritage Russian speakers (Mage=78 years) who participated in the MAIN task in both of their languages. Once the narratives and question-answering sessions were recorded (in-person and on Zoom), we used the recently introduced AI-pipeline (Liu & MacWhinney, 2024) called BatchAlign-2 (BA2) to transcribe, align, morphologically and syntactically tag, and translate the recordings. The resulting output was .cha files for CHILDES-TALKBANK that can be analyzed for microstructural features using CLAN (MacWhinney, 2000). We will present the first descriptive findings from the Baby Birds narrative for these older bilingual participants in their heritage Russian.
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