Narrative Tell and Retell in Mandarin-English Bilingual Children

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Speech-Language Pathology

Background:

• Narrative tasks are crucial for assessing bilingual children's language.
• Clinical decisions on elicitation methods and languages lack robust guidance for bilingual populations.
• Understanding language-specific narrative skills is essential for accurate assessment.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the impact of elicitation method (tell vs. retell) on narrative skills.
• To examine the influence of language (Mandarin vs. English) on narrative macro- and microstructure.
• To provide evidence-based guidance for speech-language pathologists assessing bilingual children.

Main Methods:

• Collected narrative samples (tell and retell) from 79 Mandarin-English bilingual children.
• Utilized the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN).
• Analyzed macro- and microstructure narrative measures in both Mandarin and English.

Main Results:

• Children demonstrated superior narrative retells over tells for macrostructure (story structure, complexity, internal states).
• A retell advantage in microstructure was observed across all measures in English and in story length/lexical diversity in Mandarin.
• Linguistic differences between Mandarin and English influenced morphosyntactic outcomes in microstructure.

Conclusions:

• Narrative macrostructure improved with a model (retell) and was relatively stable across languages.
• Narrative microstructure skills were language-specific, with Mandarin morphosyntax showing less malleability.
• Findings inform clinical practices for elicitation and interpretation of narrative assessments in bilingual children.