A Multimodal narrative intervention improves the frequency of use of catalan in spanish-dominant preschoolers

Abstract

Several narrative-based intervention programs have been designed to boost different children’s linguistic abilities. Nevertheless, very few studies have fully assessed the role of multimodality (e.g., embodied speech involving hand and bodily gestures, and facial expressions) in these interventions, which could really make a difference to the involvement and the social interaction of the children and, therefore, have an impact on the results. Thus, little is known about how a multimodal narrative-based intervention could play a role boosting the frequency of use of bilingual’s less-dominant language. For this, the current study will test the effectiveness of the MultiModal Narrative (MMN) intervention –initially designed to train macrostructure and perspective taking– in boosting Catalan, the weaker language of a group of 34 5- to 6-year-old Spanish-Catalan bilinguals. To test the value of a multimodal narrative training on the frequency of use of Catalan and, a between-subjects pre- and post-intervention design was planned with the MMN 9-session intervention. Participants were assigned to either the experimental (multimodal or non-multimodal) or the control group. Importantly, while children in the multimodal condition were exposed to emphatic multimodal markers, and were encouraged to embody the most relevant actions and emotions of the stories, children in thenonmultimodal group received the same narrative-based intervention with natural multimodality. Frequency of use was measured by assessing the percentage of use of the target language in the vocabulary and narrative retelling pre- and post-test tasks. Results revealed that the two experimental groups outperformed the control group, showing statistically significant gains in Catalan frequency of use the two post-intervention tasks (mean increase of 27.65% in the narrative retelling task, and of 11.56% on the vocabulary test).