ERIC Number: ED413761
Record Type: RIE
Publication Date: 1997-Apr
Pages: 17
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Early Trilingualism: Basque, English, and Spanish.
Cenoz, Jasone; Barnes, Julia
This study compared narratives in Spanish, Basque, and English of a 5-year-old trilingual child. The child produced narratives of a familiar story, learned through an English video recording, in each language while looking at a printed version of the story. All interlocutors were adult native speakers of the languages, well known to the child. The three interactions were videotape-recorded. In English, he produced 78 utterances with a mean length of 6.115. The total number of words spoken was 477, with 153 word types. In Basque, he produced 74 utterances with a mean length of 8.18. and 457 words with 196 different word types. In Spanish, he produced 35 utterances with a mean length of 6.17, and 216 words with 82 word types. Analysis also examined phonetic, grammatical, discourse-related, and pragmatic characteristics of the narratives. It is concluded that the child's strongest language is Basque, with more fluent and accurate production, despite the fact that he had seen the original video story only in English. Spanish production was elicited and was limited to description of a few elements in each picture, with all narrative in the present tense. Code mixing was not common in the data obtained, but some cross-linguistic influence was found. Contains eight references. (MSE)
Publication Type: Reports - Research; Speeches/Meeting Papers
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Note: Paper presented at the International Symposium on Bilingualism (Newcastle, England, United Kingdom, April 1997).