Investigating Children’s Narrative Abilities in a Chinese and Multilingual Context: Cantonese, Mandarin, Kam and Urdu Adaptations of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN)

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Rachel T. Y. Kan¹  Angel Chan²  Natalia Gagarina⁵ 

[1] Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, Faculty of Humanities, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University;Research Centre for Language, Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University;Speech Therapy Unit, Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University;PolyU-Research Centre on Chinese Linguistics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University;Leibniz Center for General Linguistics (ZAS)

关键词: narrative abilities;    language assessment;    Developmental Language Disorder;    bilingualism/multilingualism;    Chinese languages;    Urdu;    ethnic minority children;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2020.573780

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

This article introduces the LITMUS-MAIN (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings-MAIN) and motivates the adaptation of this instrument into Chinese languages and language pairs involving a Chinese language, namely Cantonese, Mandarin, Kam, Urdu. We propose that these new adapted protocols not only contribute to the theoretical discussion on story grammar and widen the evidential base of MAIN to include more languages in studying bilinguals, they also offer new methods of assessing language development in young children that have the potential to tease apart the effects of language impairment and bilingualism and improve the identification of Developmental Language Disorder. These new protocols are the first tools to be designed for the dual assessment of language skills in these particular languages, in particular narrative skills in bilingual children speaking these languages. By catering to under-researched languages and over-looked groups of bilingual children, these new tools could improve the clinical management for certain bilingual ethnic minority children such as Urdu-Cantonese and Kam-Mandarin bilinguals, as well as promote the study of these groups and their acquisition issues. Advances in understanding the theoretical and acquisition issues in childhood bilingualism can also be made possible using these new tools.

【 授权许可】

CC BY