Narrative Tell and Retell in Mandarin-English Bilingual Children

Speech-language pathologists often adopt narrative tasks to assess bilingual children's language skills. However, limited research guides clinical decisions about elicitation method, assessment language, and interpretation of results for specific bilingual populations. The present study examined the impact of elicitation method (tell vs. retell) and language (Mandarin vs. English) on macro- and microstructure narrative skills in Mandarin-English bilingual children.

We collected narrative tell and retell samples from 79 Mandarin-English bilingual children using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives both online and in-person and analyzed macro- and microstructure measures in each language.

For macrostructure, children produced better narrative retells than tells across story structure, story complexity, and number of internal state terms, with cross-linguistic differences only in story structure (Mandarin > English). Code-switching did not significantly impact macrostructure scores. For microstructure, a retell advantage was found across all measures (story length, lexical diversity, sentence length, and syntactic complexity) in English but only in story length and lexical diversity in Mandarin. Post hoc analyses revealed that the differential effect of elicitation method on morphosyntactic outcomes between languages is likely due to linguistic differences.

This study highlighted distinct narrative patterns in Mandarin-English bilingual children across languages and elicitation methods. Macrostructure showed greater improvement when given a narrative model than microstructure and was stable across languages, although cultural factors may affect performance. Microstructure was language-specific, with Mandarin morphosyntactic skills being the least malleable. These results guide clinicians in choosing elicitation tasks and interpreting narrative performance in Mandarin-English bilingual children.

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.33050048.