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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article

Front. Commun.
Sec. Language Communication
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2024.1400984
This article is part of the Research Topic New Trends in Typical and Atypical Language Acquisition View all 15 articles

Reference management in written narrative production by Spanish-Italian bilingual children

Provisionally accepted
Victoria Leonetti Escandell Victoria Leonetti Escandell *
  • Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This paper is an investigation of reference production in 84 Italian-Spanish bilingual children aged 8 to 12. The study explores whether such reference production is influenced by either the type of referential expression involved or language dominance by analyzing how these children manage reference. The children's relative proficiency in the two languages (and thus their language dominance) was assessed through a cloze-test, and their narrative production was evaluated using a retelling task. Results indicated a preference for null pronouns to refer to subjects and full referential expressions for objects, with Italian showing a higher occurrence of full referential expressions. Dominance in either language did not significantly impact reference production. This suggests that bilingual children can distinguish between language-specific patterns, a behavior consistent with adult monolingual groups. These results contribute to our understanding of bilingual reference management and shed light on the role played by language and language dominance.

    Keywords: bilingualism, anaphora, narratives, spanish, Italian

    Received: 14 Mar 2024; Accepted: 29 Jul 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Leonetti Escandell. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Victoria Leonetti Escandell, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain

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