The talk of Professor Natalia Gagarina will take place On Tuesday, January 15th at 4pm in SH 3.104.

Title: Referentiality in bilingual oral and written texts

Abstract:

The goal of this talk is to trace the developmental trajectory of referentiality in Russian-German bilinguals and to compare monolingual and bilingual strategies of the use of referential cohesive desives. While referentiality in elicited narratives has been discussed in numerous publications (Berman & Slobin, 1994, etc.), few studies have so far used picture stories that were controlled for cognitive complexity and for the order of appearance of protagonists in parallel sets of theoretically-based pictorial stimuli and protocols for narrative elicitation and analyses. This is the empirical and theoretical novelty a number of studies, which uses elicited narratives from Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN, Gagarina et al. 2012) to answer the following questions: How do monolingual and bilingual children introduce and maintain referents? Which regularities can be traced across languages with and without an article system and/or other expression of definiteness?