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Bilingual children’s story comprehension across language boundaries: does retelling improve comprehension?

ABSTRACT The main objective of this study was to investigate 9–10-year-old children’s comprehension processes during listening to and free recall of a story. A cross-linguistic design comprised texts in L1 German and recall in L2 English and vice versa. Corresponding mono-linguistic control conditions in either L1 or L2 allowed to examine the extent to which higher-level comprehension processes led to the same performance of story recall, construction of a coherent text representation and inference making across language boundaries. The findings revealed that comprehension predominantly occurred during the input phase. Better comprehension resulted when L1 input was provided as opposed to L2 input. Retelling the story in L1 added less to comprehension when the input was in L2. The findings supported the prediction derived from the capacity hypothesis that bilingual children’s comprehension benefits from resources set free by more automatic processing during listening to a story in L1. A comparable automaticity effect was not observed during retelling in L1. L1-dominant bilinguals’ comprehension reacted sensitively to bilingual language conditions in contrast to balanced bilinguals’ performance.