Telling stories in two languages: Narratives of bilingual preschool children with typical and impaired language

Abstract

Two studies investigated five- and six-year-old preschool children's narrative production in an attempt to show how LI may impinge on narrative production in measurable ways. Study 1 analyzed renderings of familiar stories for group (typical language development vs. language impairment), story content (Jungle Book/Goldilocks) and language (English/Hebrew) differences on a range of discourse (story grammar categories), lexical (e.g., words, word types), morphosyntactic (e.g., verb inflections, prepositions) and bilingual (code-switching) measures. It showed intact performance for narrative structure in both groups and in both languages despite differences in lexis, morphosyntax and bilingualism. Study 2 pursued bilingual code-switching as a means to examine differences between children with typical language development (TLD) and language impairment (LI) in a retelling task where each child retold three stories (from native language/L1, second language/L2 and bilingual contexts) to interlocutors with different language preferences. Both groups showed sociolinguistic sensitivity in code-switching behavior, but frequency and directionality of code-switching revealed group differences. The article argues for the use of a range of indicators of LI including those unique to bilingual children.