TY  - JOUR
A1  - Torregrossa, Jacopo
A1  - Listanti, Andrea
A1  - Bongartz, Christiane M.
A1  - Marinis, Theodoros
T1  - Adding discourse to sentence repetition tasks: Under which conditions does bilingual children’s performance improve?
T2  - Research methods in applied linguistics
N2  - Sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) have been extensively used as measures of bilinguals’ language abilities. Most studies relied on SRTs in which the target sentences were not connected to each other. However, participants’ performance may differ if these sentences are embedded in discourse, since discourse provides participants with additional cues for sentence comprehension and interpretation. For the present study, we designed a discourse-based SRT, whereby the target sentences were connected to each other in a story. We examined the effect of discourse on bilinguals’ performance in the SRT and investigated whether this effect varied based on the language of administration, bilinguals’ dominance score and type of target structure. We tested 32 Italian-German bilingual children (7–12 years) living in Germany with two SRTs in each language, one with discourse and one without discourse. Participants showed a better performance in the SRTs with discourse, especially in the heritage language (Italian). The effect of discourse was visible across the board with all target structures. On the whole, SRTs with discourse seem to reduce the processing costs associated with lexical retrieval and shifts in scenarios, thus tapping more directly into children's processing abilities, compared to more traditional SRTs. The results are discussed in terms of ecological validity of different assessment instruments.
KW  - Sentence repetition task
KW  - Discourse
KW  - German-Italian bilinguals
KW  - Syntactic complexity
Y1  - 2024
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/84478
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-844786
SN  - 2772-7661
VL  - 3
IS  - 2,100107
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -