Narrating “Frog Stories” in Two Languages：How English-Japanese Bilingual Children Encode and Schematize Perspectives

Masahiko Minami[1]

Abstract：In the process of language development children are faced with a variety of interlocking challenges，which may become more complicated for bilingual children who need to learn more than one set of language-specific principles.The purpose of this study is to examine within- and across-language relationships between grammatical forms and semantic/communicative functions by focusing on complex grammatical measures，such as transitive and intransitive verbs，active and passive voices，durative and completive forms，as well as referential topic management.Forty English-Japanese bilingual children produced narratives in both languages，describing two scenes of agency and its resultant causal implications.Analyses of these bilingual children's narrative examples—examining how the narrator adopted a particular perspective to describe a particular scene—reveal strong associations between the perception/schematization of the scene and selected grammatical measures，indicating how language supports the narrator's cognition/schematization.Some relationships between grammatical forms have also been identified across the two languages，and we may consider the existence of such cross-linguistic correlations in the light of cognitive development in bilingual children；that is，bilinguals schematize a given scene in similar or even identical ways，choose an appropriate verb，and encode agency accordingly.Cross-linguistic comparisons，at the same time，indicate a language-specific tendency to use continuative/completive，and，educationally more important，to use sporadically or even omit encoding causality.These findings will lead to a discussion of issues particular to bilingual children in educational settings.

Key words：narrative；bilingual；schema/schematization；transitive verb/intransitive verb；active voice/passive voice；durative form/completive form