The expression of definiteness in Italian narratives by bilingual children: experimental study, and teaching applications

The aim of this study is to analyze the expression of definiteness in a narrative task in Italian administered to bilingual and monolingual children (aged 4;0-8;3 years). Three groups of bilingual children were examined, all with Italian as the societal language and three different family languages: Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese. Noun phrases (NPs) were extracted from narrative productions and coded based on whether the referent in the story was identifiable to the interlocutor. The form of the determiner (definite, indefinite, demonstrative, or bare noun) was also coded. The analysis investigated if the distribution of forms according to identifiability was the same across all groups. The results revealed that all children are sensitive to the abstract dimension of referent identifiability. The groups speaking Arabic and Spanish as their family language showed a distribution of determiners similar to monolinguals, while the Chinese-speaking group emerged as different, displaying a preference for bare nouns or demonstratives when the referent is identifiable. This was interpreted as an effect of the family language on Italian. Examining the impact of internal (linguistic and cognitive) and external (quantity and quality of input) factors, an interplay between morphosyntactic and pragmatic competence in referential choices was observed. Among external factors, linguistically challenging and engaging activities in Italian (e.g., multimedia games, free play with peers, reading) seem to have a positive impact on children’s referential skills. The study concluded with a pedagogical proposal experimenting the positive effects of multilingual narrative as a teaching tool in linguistically super-diverse classrooms.