AUTHOR=Antonijevic Stanislava , Colleran Sarah , Kerr Clodagh , Ní Mhíocháin Treasa 

TITLE=Online assessment of narrative macrostructure in adult Irish-English multilinguals

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 13 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.916214

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2022.916214

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=Background: Online assessment of narrative production and comprehension became an important component of language assessment during COVID 19 pandemic. This study aimed to establish quantitative measures of narrative macrostructure in production and comprehension of adult Irish-English bilinguals in an online assessment. 
Methods: 30 Irish-English bilingual adults participated in an online assessment of oral narrative production and comprehension. Narratives were elicited using LITMUS-MAIN for Irish and English. Story-tell elicitation method was used for all stories. 20 participants produced Baby Birds and Baby Goats story pairs while 10 participants produced Cat and Dog story pairs. Quantitative measures of story structure, comprehension score and the overall number of Internal State Terms (ISTs) in production and comprehension were compared across the story pairs, languages and the output type (production vs comprehension). 
Results: A general linear model indicated no differences in either story structure or story comprehension scores across languages for both sets of stories. Combined analysis for all participants and stories indicated no difference in the story structure scores or comprehension scores across the languages or across the story pairs. While the overall number of ISTs was the same across languages, a higher number of ISTs was observed in comprehension relative to production in both languages for Cat and Dog story pair only, but not for Baby birds and Baby goats stories. The major benefit of using online assessment was accessibility of participants. The major drawback was inability to control environment and the quality of internet connection.  
Conclusions and implications: While online assessment increased availability of participants, which is a significant factor in rural Ireland characterised by low population density and the high percentage of Irish speakers, the availability of stable internet connection limited applicability of online assessment. Measures of narrative macrostructure were stable across the languages and across the story pairs. This is important because of high variability in exposure to Irish, frequent code-switching, and high number of morphosyntactic errors due to rapid language change that characterise Irish-English bilinguals. Identifying reliable measures of language performance for Irish-English adult speakers is an important step towards establishing developmental norms for Irish-English bilinguals.