"Comprehension of texts and understanding of questions is a cornerstone of successful human communication. Whilst reading comprehension has been thoroughly investigated in the last decade, there is surprisingly little research on children's comprehension of picture stories, particularly for bilinguals. This can be partially explained by the lack of cross-culturally robust, cross-linguistic instruments targeting early narration. This book presents an inference-based model of narrative comprehension and a tool that grew out of a large-scale European project on multilingualism. Covering a range of language settings, the book uses the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives to answer the question which narrative comprehension skills (bilingual) children can be expected to master at a certain age, and explores how such comprehension is affected (or not affected) by linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Linking theory to method, the book will appeal to researchers in linguistics and psychology and graduate students interested in narrative, multilingualism, and language acquisition"--.

• Developing Narrative Comprehension
• Editorial page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of contents
• Acknowledging our reviewers
• Cross-linguistic development of narrative comprehension from A to Z
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Narrative comprehension and how it can be understood
    • 2.1 Theoretical background
    • 2.2 Comprehension of stories in different modalities
  • 3. Our model of inference-based visual narrative comprehension
  • 4. The MAIN materials
    • 4.1 Background: The ‘birth’ of MAIN
    • 4.2 The picture stories
    • 4.3 The MAIN comprehension task
    • 4.4 Assessing narrative comprehension with MAIN
  • 5. The contributions of the book
  • 6. Narrative comprehension outcomes
    • 6.1 Steep increase with age initially
    • 6.2 Reaching a milestone by age 5
    • 6.3 Variation at earlier ages
    • 6.4 Similarity in narrative comprehension in bilinguals’ two languages
    • 6.5 Factors affecting narrative comprehension
    • 6.6 Putting our tool to the test
  • 7. Conclusion
  • Funding
  • References
• Narrative comprehension in Lebanese Arabic-French bilingual children
  • 1. Introduction
    • 1.1 Lebanon’s multilingual context and the challenges for language assessment
    • 1.2 Development of narrative comprehension
    • 1.3 Factors involved in the development of narrative comprehension
  • 2. Objectives
  • 3. Method
    • 3.1 Participants
    • 3.2 Materials
    • 3.3 Procedures
    • 3.4 Narrative measures
  • 4. Results
    • 4.1 Development of narrative comprehension in Lebanese Arabic and French
    • 4.2 Comparison of narrative comprehension in Lebanese Arabic and French
    • 4.3 Development of comprehension skills in relation with the development of story structure and story complexity
    • 4.4 Development of comprehension skills in relation with language dominance and with exposure to stories
  • 5. Discussion
    • 5.1 Development of narrative comprehension in Lebanese Arabic and French
    • 5.2 Comparison of comprehension skills of children in both languages
    • 5.3 Development of narrative comprehension in relation with production
    • 5.4 Development of comprehension skills in relation with language dominance, expressive vocabulary, and exposure to stories
  • 6. Conclusion and clinical implications
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix A. Items included in the Exposure to Narratives Index (ENI)
  • Appendix B.
• Inferential comprehension, age and language: How Swedish-German bilingual preschoolers understand picture-based stories
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Background
    • 2.1 General findings
    • 2.2 Comprehension in MAIN
  • 3. Aim and research questions
  • 4. Methods
    • 4.1 Participants
    • 4.2 Materials
    • 4.3 Procedure
    • 4.4 Scoring and categorization of the comprehension questions
  • 5. Results
    • 5.1 Comprehension scores: Differences between age groups, tasks and languages
    • 5.2 Comprehension scores: Effect of expressive vocabulary knowledge
    • 5.3 The performance of individual children
    • 5.4 Different comprehension questions
  • 6. Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Funding
  • References
• Bilingual Turkish-Swedish children’s understanding of MAIN picture sequences: Individual variation, age, language and task effects
  • 1. Introduction and background
  • 2. Aim and research questions
  • 3. Method
    • 3.1 Participants
    • 3.2 Materials
    • 3.3 Procedure
    • 3.4 Scoring
  • 4. Results
    • 4.1 MAIN comprehension scores: Differences between languages, tasks and age groups
    • 4.2 MAIN comprehension scores: Individual variation
    • 4.3 Influence of vocabulary knowledge on MAIN comprehension scores
    • 4.4 Performance on individual comprehension questions
  • 5. Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Funding
  • References
• Narrative comprehension in simultaneously bilingual Finnish-Swedish and monolingual Finnish children
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Method
    • 2.1 Participants
    • 2.2 Procedure and design
    • 2.3 Statistical analysis
  • 3. Results
    • 3.1 Narrative comprehension: Total score on comprehension questions
    • 3.2 Associations between narrative comprehension and production
    • 3.3 Children’s performance on the different comprehension questions
  • 4. Discussion
    • 4.1 Language comparison
    • 4.2 Group comparison
    • 4.3 Associations between narrative comprehension and production
    • 4.4 Task comparison
    • 4.5 Comprehension of different macrostructural components
  • 5. Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Funding
  • References
• Narrative comprehension by Croatian-Italian bilingual children 5–7 years old: The role of receptive vocabulary and sentence comprehension
  • 1. Introduction
    • 1.1 Assessing narrative skills
    • 1.2 Narrative comprehension in monolingual children
    • 1.3 Narrative comprehension in bilingual children
    • 1.4 The current study
  • 2. Method
    • 2.1 Participants
    • 2.2 Materials
    • 2.3 Statistical analyses
  • 3. Results
    • 3.1 Descriptive statistics
    • 3.2 Relationships between participant characteristics and language skills
    • 3.3 The role of receptive vocabulary and sentence comprehension in narrative comprehension
  • 4. Discussion
    • 4.1 Narrative comprehension in L1 and L2
    • 4.2 Associations between language skills and languages
  • 5. Conclusion
  • Funding
  • References
• Bilingual children’s lexical and narrative comprehension in Dutch as the majority language
  • 1. Introduction
    • 1.1 The role of the input
    • 1.2 Comparisons of bilingual and monolingual children: Lexicon
    • 1.3 Comparisons of bilingual and monolingual children: Narration
    • 1.4 The current research
  • 2. Method
    • 2.1 Participants
    • 2.2 Measures and materials
    • 2.3 Procedures
    • 2.4 Data-analysis
  • 3. Results
    • 3.1 Research question 1: Comparing bilingual and monolingual children
    • 3.2 Research question 2: Comparing bilingual Tarifit-Dutch and Turkish-Dutch children
    • 3.3 Research question 3: The role of input in the bilingual samples
  • 4. Discussion and conclusion
    • 4.1 Lexical and narrative comprehension: Bilinguals versus monolinguals
    • 4.2 Lexical and narrative comprehension: Variation within a bilingual sample
    • 4.3 Clinical and educational implications
    • 4.4 Limitations of the study and future research
    • 4.5 Conclusions
  • Funding
  • References
  • Appendix 1. Listening comprehension, sum of points per question (number of children who received this question)
  • Appendix 1. Listening comprehension, sum of points per question (number of children who received this question)
  • Appendix 2. Generated story comprehension (sum of points per question), sum of points per question (number of children who received this question)
• Why do you think the boy would be unhappy if he saw what the cat was eating?: Comprehension of German narratives in Russian- and Turkish-German bilingual children
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Aims and research questions
  • 3. Method
    • 3.1 Participants
    • 3.2 Materials
    • 3.3 Procedure
    • 3.4 Statistical analysis
  • 4. Results
    • 4.1 Total scores for comprehension questions
    • 4.2 Comprehension questions with regard to the age group and elicitation mode
    • 4.3 An in-depth analysis of goals and internal states
    • 4.4 A quantitative note on examples from our dataset
  • 5. Discussion and conclusion
  • References
• Narrative comprehension and its associations with gender and nonverbal cognitive skills in monolingual and bilingual German preschoolers
  • 1. Narrative skills
    • 1.1 Narrative comprehension
    • 1.2 Research on nonverbal cognitive skills and narrative comprehension
    • 1.3 Research on gender and narrative comprehension
  • 2. The present study
  • 3. Methods
    • 3.1 Participants
    • 3.2 Main
    • 3.3 Cpm
  • 4. Results
    • 4.1 Narrative comprehension
    • 4.2 Impact of nonverbal cognitive skills on narrative comprehension
    • 4.3 Impact of gender on narrative comprehension
  • 5. Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Bilingualism effects in the narrative comprehension of children with Developmental Language Disorder and L2-Greek: Links with language, executive function and Theory of Mind
  • 1. Introduction
    • 1.1 Narrative comprehension and language ability
    • 1.2 Narrative comprehension and executive functions
    • 1.3 Narrative comprehension and Theory of Mind
  • 2. Aims and research questions
  • 3. Method
    • 3.1 Participants
    • 3.2 General procedure
    • 3.3 Materials and procedure
    • 3.4 Analysis plan
  • 4. Results
    • 4.1 Narrative task
    • 4.2 Language Ability tests
    • 4.3 Executive function: 2-back task
    • 4.4 Online video verification first-order false belief task
    • 4.5 Narrative comprehension, age, language dominance and independent language ability, executive function and ToM assessments
  • 5. Discussion
  • 6. Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix
• Commentary: Time travel in the development of cross-linguistic narrative evaluation
  • Important
  • Amazing
  • References
• Index