Story retelling by bilingual children with language impairments and typically developing controls

Abstract

Background To date, there is limited information documenting growth patterns in the narratives of bilingual children with and without primary language impairment (PLI). Aims This study was designed to determine whether bilingual children with and without PLI present similar gains from kindergarten to first grade in the macro- and microstructure of stories told in Spanish and English. Methods and Procedures In this longitudinal study, 21 bilingual children identified with PLI were each matched to a bilingual typically-developing (TD) peer on age, sex, nonverbal IQ and language exposure. During their kindergarten and first grade years, children retold stories from wordless picture books in Spanish (L1) and English (L2). Outcomes and Results Overall, TD children outperformed those with PLI on measures of macrostructure and microstructure at both time points. For the macrostructure measure, the TD group made significantly larger improvements in both languages from kindergarten to first grade than the PLI group. For microstructure, the TD children made more gains on their Spanish retells than their English retells. However, the PLI children’s microstructure scores did not differ from kindergarten to first grade in either language. We found that macrostructure scores in Spanish at kindergarten predicted macrostructure scores in English at first grade when English experience was held constant. However, this same relationship across languages was not evident in microstructure. Conclusions and Implications TD and PLI children differed in the development of narrative macrostructure and microstructure between kindergarten and first grade. The TD bilinguals transferred conceptually-dependent narrative skills easily, but then had to independently learn the nuances of each language to be successful using literate language. Because most children with PLI need more exposure to establish strong connections between their L1 and L2, they had more difficulty transferring their knowledge of literate language forms from one language to another.

Synthesizing Information From Language Samples and Standardized Tests in School-Age Bilingual Assessment

“…Squires et al (2014) examined narratives from Spanish-English bilingual children with and without PLI in kindergarten and again in first grade. At each grade level, bilingual children with PLI scored lower than their peers with typical development in each language on measures of narrative micro-and macrostructure.…”

The Home Literacy Environment and the English Narrative Development of Spanish–English Bilingual Children

“…Previous cross-sectional and longitudinal studies on the English narratives of Spanish-English bilingual children have demonstrated that both microstructure and macrostructure improve as children progress from preschool to the early school-age years (e.g., Muñoz, Gillam, Peña, & Gulley-Faehnle, 2003;Rojas & Iglesias, 2013;Squires et al, 2014;Uccelli & Páez, 2007). However, the factors that may support narrative development have not been widely investigated.…”

“…Most important, future studies should directly measure whether home literacy activities are completed in English and/or Spanish and whether the language of the activity differentially supports children's English microstructure and macrostructure narrative development. Although there is general consensus that macrostructure is a skill that can transfer between languages (e.g., Pearson, 2002;Squires et al, 2014), at present there is a paucity of research that examines whether direct exposure to narratives in one language at home will transfer to children's macrostructure abilities in the other language. Future studies should also address the frequency of storytelling activities needed to affect growth in narrative abilities.…”

Russian language proficiency of monolingual and Russian–English bi/multilingual children

“…As with earlier studies of children's narratives (Bedore et al, 2010;Squires et al, 2014), the parameters employed for the description of children's speech included: speech rate (in number of words per minute); total vocabulary produced (the total number of words in the narrative); number of distinct lexical items; number of verbs and nouns; number of utterances; the longest utterance (in number of words); mean length of utterance (in word count); number of complex and compound sentences, and number of phonological, lexical and grammatical errors.…”

“…Picture book narratives are commonly used for assessing bilingual children's speech, since they are easy to set up, pleasing and appropriate for children, and serve as an efficient way to solicit a complex language output that can be evaluated for multiple linguistic features (e.g., Bedore et al, 2010;Squires et al, 2014).…”