Reference production in Mandarin-English bilingual preschoolers: Linguistic, input, and cognitive factors.

ABSTRACT: Reference in extended discourse is vulnerable to delayed acquisition in early childhood. Although recent research has increasingly focused on effects of linguistic, input, and cognitive factors on reference production, these studies are limited in number and the results are mixed. The present study provides insight into bilingual reference production by investigating how production of referring expressions in the two languages of preschool bilingual children may be influenced by structural similarities and differences between the languages, frequency of referring expressions in maternal input, amount of exposure to each of the languages, and working memory capacity. Using two stories in the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), we examined character introduction and re-

SUBMITTER: Zhou J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9559801 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature