Narrative Production in Mandarin-Speaking Children: Effects of Language Ability and Elicitation Method

Abstract

Purpose We compared the narrative production in Mandarin-speaking children at risk (AR) for developmental language disorder (DLD) and typically developing (TD) controls to address two goals: (a) further our understanding of the Mandarin DLD phenotype and (b) examine the role of elicitation method in differentiating AR from TD. Method Twenty-one AR children and 21 age- and nonverbal IQ–matched peers produced two stories from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument of Narrative, first following an adult model (i.e., story-retell) and then without a model (i.e., story-tell). Group and task effects were analyzed on macrostructure and microstructure measures. Results For general macrostructure score and sentence complexity, children in the AR group performed more poorly than TD children on the more challenging story-tell task and showed decreased scores from retell to tell tasks. In addition, children in the AR group showed poorer performance on number of different words. Productivity and grammaticality measures did not show group differences. Discussion Consistent with previous findings, grammaticality and productivity were relatively preserved but story macrostructure, lexical diversity, and sentence complexity were vulnerable in Mandarin-speaking children with or AR for DLD. Having an adult model benefited both groups in sentence complexity and story macrostructure and potentially helped maintain the performance in TD children as they engaged in the more challenging story-telling task.

The Bilingual Home Language Boost Through the Lens of the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…The Mandarin adaptation involved several rounds of translation and revision and the incorporation of Mandarinspecific examples to explain the rating scale. The Mandarin ITALK has been used in previous studies of Mandarin-English bilingual children (Sheng et al, 2011(Sheng et al, , 2014 as well as monolingual Mandarin-speaking children (Sheng et al, 2020). English and Mandarin oral language proficiency was rated on a 0-5 scale in the domains of vocabulary, sentence length, speech intelligibility, listening comprehension, and grammatical proficiency.…”

Mean length of utterance among Mandarin-speaking children with and without DLD

“…They found that the AR group exhibited poorer abilities in story structures, sentence complexity, and lexical diversity than did the TD group. In previous studies about DLD, SLI, and LI, researchers did not reach a conclusion on grammatical errors and number of complex sentences as evident measures for identifying Mandarin-speaking children with DLD (Sheng et. al., 2020; Torng and Sah, 2019).…”

“…Limited studies have addressed the language abilities of Mandarin-speaking children with DLD. Sheng et al (2020) studied narrative production in Mandarin-speaking children at risk (AR) for DLD and typically-developing (TD) controls who were aged from 3 years and 6 months old to 6 years and 5 months old. They found that the AR group exhibited poorer abilities in story structures, sentence complexity, and lexical diversity than did the TD group.…”

Investigating Children’s Narrative Abilities in a Chinese and Multilingual Context: Cantonese, Mandarin, Kam and Urdu Adaptations of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN)

“…For example, the Urdu and Cantonese versions of MAIN have been used to assess bilingual children with and without suspected language impairments, and show promise to differentiate between the two groups (Chan et al, 2018;Chan et al, under revision). Another example of using MAIN in research is Sheng et al (2020), where there is evidence for differentiation between Mandarin-speaking children at risk for DLD and typically developing controls using Mandarin MAIN.…”