Chapter 11. The narrative abilities of Spanish monolinguals and Spanish–Catalan bilinguals with Prader–Willi syndrome

Abstract

This study investigates the narrative abilities of seven Spanish monolinguals and six Spanish – Catalan bilinguals with Prader–Willi syndrome. All participants were asked to narrate A boy, a dog, and a frog (Mayer, 1967) in Spanish. Additionally, bilinguals were also asked to narrate Frog, where are you? (Mayer, 1969) in Catalan. Both narrative corpora were analyzed according to their macrostructure (Narrative Scoring System) and microstructure (Mean Length per Utterance and Type-Token Ratio measures). Monolinguals and bilinguals showed similar macrostructural abilities as well as comparable morphosyntactic language development; however, a positive effect of bilingualism was detected when evaluating participants’ lexical variability. Bilingual speakers showed comparable narrative abilities in both Spanish and Catalan.