Do Older Bilinguals Tell Better Stories

Abstract

Efforts to understand changes in language development and variations in language production across lifespan have increased considerably in the past several decades (Sankoff, 2017). In narrative discourse production, although several studies have reported age-related differences, the findings are not consistent. Additionally, previous research has investigated age-related changes in discourse production either with monolingual participants or with bilingual participants cross-linguistically in their first and second languages. This case study attempts to investigate age-related changes in narrative speech produced by six bilinguals aged between 6 and 53 years in L3-English. The narratives produced by the participants were analyzed with respect to quantity, informative content and narrative cohesion. The findings obtained on each of the measures showed increase in fluency and informative content, yet a fluctuation in cohesion across age.