بررسی عناصر ریزساختار و کلان ساختار داستان های روایت شده توسط کودکان دو زبانه کردی-فارسی زبان با اختلالِ طیفِ اُتیسم (مقاله علمی وزارت علوم)
درجه علمی: نشریه علمی (وزارت علوم)
آرشیو
چکیده
پژوهش حاضر تأثیر دوزبانگی و اختلالِ طیفِ اُتیسم بر روایت داستان را در کودکان بررسی کرده است. به این منظور، داستان های روایت شده توسط کودکان دوزبانه کردی-فارسی زبانِ با اختلالِ طیفِ اُتیسم و بدون اختلالِ طیفِ اُتیسم و کودکان تک زبانه با اختلالِ طیفِ اُتیسم و بدون اختلالِ طیفِ اُتیسم ارزیابی شدند. آزمودنی های پژوهش، یک داستانِ مصورِ سه صحنه ای را که هر صحنه از آن، روی یک کارت نشان داده شده بود، نگاه می کردند و همزمان با مرتب کردنِ ترتیبِ آن صحنه ها، شروع به روایت داستان کردند. تولید زبان (تعداد پاره گفتار ها، تعداد کل واژه ها)، عناصر کلان ساختار (ترتیب مناسب رویدادها، تعداد رویدادهای ذکرشده و پیوستگی) عناصر ریزساختار (معرفی شخصیت، حفظ ارجاع و استفاده از حروف ربط) ارزیابی شدند. یافته های پژوهش نشان داد که از نظر تولید زبان کودکان دوزبانه در مقایسه با کودکان تک زبانه، پاره گفتارهای بیشتری تولید کردند. از نظر عناصر کلان ساختار، کودکان طبیعی داستان های پیوسته تری تولید کردند. بین گروه ها از نظر عناصر ریزساختار تفاوت آماری معنی داری مشاهده نشد. همچنین، یافته های پژوهش نشان داد که تعداد پاره گفتار های داستان های روایت شده توسط آزمودنی های دوزبانه (با اختلالِ طیفِ اُتیسم و بدون اختلالِ طیفِ اُتیسم) در مقایسه با تعداد آن ها در کودکان تک زبانه (با و بدون اختلالِ طیفِ اُتیسم) با افزایش همراه بوده است. نتایج پژوهش حاکی از آن است که دوزبانگی تأثیر منفی بر مهارت های کودکان با اختلالِ طیفِ اُتیسم ندارد.An Investigation of the Micro- and Macro-Structures of Narratives by Bilingual Kurdish-Persian Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
Abstract
The present study investigated the effects of bilingualism and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on children’s abilities to narrate a story. To this aim, the stories narrated by monolingual and bilingual Kurdish-Persian-speaking children with and without ASD were compared. They were given a set of 3 picture cards depicting a scenario and were asked to sequence the cards and tell a story. Then, their language productions (number of utterances and total number of words), macrostructures (appropriate sequencing of events, number of events mentioned, and coherence), and microstructures (character introductions, maintenance of referential terms, use of grammatical gender, and use of connectives) were measured. The findings showed that the bilinguals produced more utterances compared to the monolinguals despite having marginally lower receptive vocabulary scores in Persian. Also, the typically-developing children provided more coherent narratives. No significant differences were found in their microstructures. There were no decrements in the narratives of the monolingual and bilingual children with and without ASD. In fact, an increased number of utterances were found in the bilinguals’ narratives. The current findings suggested that bilingualism does not negatively affect narrative skills in children with ASD.
Keywords: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Bilingualism, Narrative, Microstructure, Macrostructure
Introduction
Recent studies have demonstrated that bilingually-exposed children with ASD do not present additional language delays compared with monolingual children with ASD (Drysdale et al., 2015). However, most evidence on language development in bilingually-exposed children with ASD to date has been related to the early stages of language development prior to age 6 by using standardized measures, but we know very little about more sophisticated aspects of language use, i.e., discourse and narrative. In the present study, short narratives produced by 4 groups of school-age children, i.e., bilingual and monolingual children with ASD and bilingual and monolingual typically-developing children in a picture-sequencing task, were compared. Creating a narrative requires coordination of multiple levels of language. The broadest level, which is called macrostructure, refers to the global coherence of narratives. Conversely, microstructure is defined by smaller linguistic levels, i.e., anaphoric reference and use of connectives, which are necessary for maintaining local cohesion throughout the narrative (Hickmann, 1995). Therefore, the analysis of narratives allows for the study of a diverse range of language skills, some of which may be impacted by being bilingual and/or having an ASD.
Materials and Methods
The current study was a descriptive-analytical, quantitative, and empirical research. The statistical population of this study consisted of 7-9-year-old monolingual and bilingual children with and without ASD. From among the 4 groups of bilingual and monolingual children with and without ASD, 20 boys with an average age of 8 years and 1 month participated as the research sample. The children with ASD were selected based on some predefined criteria. The bilingual ASD children’s mother tongue was Kalhori Kurdish and their second language was Persian. They were speaking both languages at home and school. The monolingual Persian-speaking children were also selected from the same centers. According to their parents’ reports, these children spoke Persian in the home environment. The normal bilingual children were randomly selected from a public school in the city of Eyvan. These children also used both Kurdish and Persian languages in home and school settings. The bilingual normal children were selected via purposeful sampling from the public school in the mentioned city. These children only spoke Persian in home and school settings. Their nonverbal IQs (NVIQs) were assessed by using the Leiter-R (Roid & Miller, 1997) and only those with a score of greater than 80 were included in the study. The children with ASD had a clinical diagnosis from licensed clinicians or multidisciplinary groups of specialists from health care institutions. To confirm ASD symptomatology, a Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ) (Rutter et al., 2003) was administered. The 4 groups of children did not differ significantly in age, NVIQ, and maternal education (as a proxy for SES). Also, the monolinguals and bilinguals with ASD did not differ significantly in their autism symptoms. The procedure of performing the study was giving 3 sets of images that portrayed a scene, for example, a girl baking a cake or constructing a sand castle on the beach (3 cards for each set), to each of the subjects at home or in a silent room at the rehabilitation center. The children were asked to put the cards in the logical order and then tell a story according to that arrangement. Narrations of the stories were videotaped for later analysis. Two other researchers, both of whom were bilingual, witnessed the stories narrated by them as well. The numbers of utterances and words in the stories were calculated as the quantitative scale of language production. An adapted version of the NSS (Narrative Scoring Scheme), as well as an assessment tool for narratives (Miller et al., 2003), was utilized to analyze the macro- and micro-structures. 25% of the data (12 picture sequences: 3 sequences for each group of 4 participants) were double-coded by the first and second authors. The inter-rater reliability of the total score was calculated, which resulted in the agreement of 97/6% between the scores. Moreover, the discrepancies between the scores were discussed and resolved through consensus. Then, the data of the remaining participants were coded by the first author, who was blind to both diagnosis and language exposure status.
Discussion of Results and Conclusions
The results of research in the macrostructure section were in line with those obtained by Losh & Capps (2003) and Norbury & Bishop (2003): children with normal linguistic growth compared to their peers with ASD had higher scores on coherence measures. These results were also congruent with those achieved by Diehl et al. (2006), who showed that the stories narrated by the subjects with ASD included the main elements of the story but lacked coherence. Consistent with the findings of Loveland et al. (1990), some of the stories narrated by the children with ASD included irrelevant contents. There were no significant differences between the groups in terms of microstructural elements, which was not unexpected given that all the subjects had lexical scores at a normal or above the normal level. Furthermore, the effect sizes were negligible in some sub-scales of the microstructure elements. For example, the children with a normal language development regularly identified the main character of the story as a new dynamic, i.e., by using a nominal group or noun. On the other hand, in line with the findings of the research conducted by Norbury and Bishop (2003), the ASD groups used more pronouns to introduce the story characters. Children in all the groups had better performance in using inappropriate references to the objects compared to appropriate references to the characters though there are some exceptions. Interestingly, no main effects or interactions related to the language exposure (bilingual vs. monolingual) were observed in the macrostructure and microstructure elements. Consistent with the results obtained by Kunnari et al. (2014), Squires et al. (2014), and Tsimpli et al. (2016), the only difference observed in language exposure was the increase in the number of utterances produced by the bilingual compared to the monolingual children. Thus, bilingualism did not negatively impact narrative abilities in either group. This finding is of great importance for bilingual children with ASD because of their open-ended expressive language skills. Along with the evidence from Baldimtsi et al. (2016) on narrative, the findings of the current investigation rejected the negative effect of bilingualism on the language development of children with ASD. Instead, these findings supported bilingual education and child-rearing for ASD children from bilingual families or societies. In such cases, limiting a child’s linguistic environment to one language can result in significant negative social, emotional, and linguistic repercussions (Fernandezy Garcia et al., 2012). When this language is not a native language, parents may become more reluctant to speak it to their children and provide them with sub-optimal language models or may be less socially responsive to it, thus reducing their children’s language inputs. Hence, one-language practices themselves can be inadvertently detrimental to language development.
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