The impact of language dominance on Russian-Hebrew bilingual children's narrative production Microstructure, macrostructure, and Internal State Terms

The study explores the effect of language dominance on microstructure, macrostructure, and Internal State Terms (ISTs) in narratives of Russian-Hebrew bilingual children and examines within-language and cross-language associations between narrative elements in two dominance groups. Narratives were collected from 38 Russian-Hebrew bilingual children aged 5;5-6;7 using the LITMUS-MAIN retelling procedures. The children were divided into L-1-dominant (N = 19) and L-2-dominant (N = 19) bilinguals based on performance on proficiency tests in L-1/Russian and L-2/Hebrew. The narratives were coded for microstructure measures: number of different words (NDW), total number of tokens (TNT), number of C-units (CUs), and Mean Length of C-unit (MLCU); and for macrostructure measures: Story Structure and Story Complexity. Ratios of IST tokens and types were calculated per C-unit. Children produced significantly higher NDW, TNT, and MLCU in L-2/Hebrew than in L-1/Russian. Scores on macrostructure measures and ratios of total ISTs were similar across languages. L-1-dominant bilinguals demonstrated similarity between L-1 and L-2 for microstructure and IST types, whereas L-2-dominant bilinguals produced more IST types in L-2/Hebrew and had relatively few significant cross-language correlations. Findings for language dominance and cross-language differences are discussed for those narrative features which emerged as sensitive to these effects.