Bilingual Narrative Development in English and Japanese—A Form/Function Approach

How does a particular language influence the way its speakers perceive the world? One of the long-standing critical debates in language studies involves the relationship between language and thought processes. The linguistic relativity hypothesis (Whorf, 1956) claims that speakers of different languages think differently, and that they do so because of the differences in the languages they speak. A substantial amount of research has been conducted on this topic. Some studies (e.g., Bloom, 1981; Brown & Lenneberg, 1954) have offered strong evidence in favor of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, whereas others (e.g., Berlin & Kay, 1969) have resulted in findings that did not support the hypothesis, and still others (e.g., Au, 1983) have even provided evidence challenging its validity of linguistic relativity. The study reported in this paper represents an attempt to combine some aspects of (1) narrative studies and (2) bilingual studies against the background of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Studies of language acquisition and language development have focused increasingly on the structural aspects of narrative discourse (e.g., Peterson, 1990; Reilly, 1992). The development of narrative discourse skills development is a relatively complex aspect of language acquisition, particularly for persons acquiring two different languages simultaneously. Learning the skills for narrative discourse is especially complicated for bilinguals to the extent that the schema (the organization of knowledge), which provides a cultural framework of events and actions and which affects memory encoding and retrieval, differs for each of the languages used. The human mind, which is influenced by a schema of prepackaged expectations or interpretations, seems also to be under the influence of the specific linguistic systems used. Since the linguistic relativity hypothesis suggests that those who speak more than one language (e.g., bilinguals) may actually have different thought patterns when speaking different languages, this study, which examines the same story told by individuals in two different languages, sheds further light on the validity of the hypothesis. The present study deals with the notion of a language-specific story schema, an underlying organizational paradigm for stories considered necessary for successful participation in narrative interaction in a particular speech community. A story schema reveals children's competence in using the appropriate linguistic means in a narrative situation (Bamberg, 1987). As some researchers (e.g., Harris, Lee, Hensley, & Schoen, 1988; Kintsch & Greene, 1978) claim, a story schema is culturally and linguistically specific. To deal, in part, with this idea, this study, which compares the linguistic form/function relations in narrative discourse in two different languages, examines whether: "Bilinguals possess relatively separate linguistic rule systems for each of the two languages" or whether: "There is a common underlying rule system in a bilingual's mind." By analyzing the relationship between linguistic forms and their functions, the study attempts to bring to light specific characteristics in the narratives of bilingual children using the means that they have at their disposal in two different languages. This study basically adopts Berman and Slobin's (1994) definition of "form/function." Form includes a broad range of linguistic/expressive devices. Function includes the purposes served by the forms used in narrative discourse. The current study particularly explores how, when telling narratives, bilingual children express verbal notions through the use of the tense, aspect, and voice forms available in each of their two languages. For instance, the present tense is often used in script narratives, specifying the typical series of events taking place in a particular activity such as going to a restaurant or going to a birthday party. In picture-book narrations, on the other hand, if the task is regarded as a narrative activity (i.e., recounting of events spatially as well as temporally distant from the speaker), the past tense may be predominantly used. The narrator uses tense systematically when he or she refers to events and temporally relates them with each other. In this way, the tenses that narrators use reveal their subjective attitude toward a particular event.