This paper investigates the marking of indirect experience in a corpus of conversations recorded in Turkish-German bilingual families. Based on children's retellings of family stories, which necessitate a grammatical distinction between personally experienced and narratively transmitted events, the paper combines a quantitative with a discourse-analytical approach. The quantitative analysis shows that the bilingual children use indirective markers considerably less than their monolingual peers. We present three case studies, analysing input, discourse establishment, speaker-hearer interaction, comprehension, and production of forms. These analyses show how, in talking about events that occurred a generation ago, the bilingual children use unmarked, neutral forms, creating situations of confusion for their adult interlocutors, with ensuing reactions. We argue that at the formal, grammatical, level, all three children seem to follow their own system, unaffected by the adults' formal ways, their hints and recastings.
