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Telling stories in two languages: Narratives of bilingual preschool children with typical and impaired language*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2011

PERI ILUZ-COHEN  and
JOEL WALTERS
PERI ILUZ-COHEN
Affiliation:
Department of English, Bar-Ilan University
JOEL WALTERS*
Affiliation:
Department of English, Bar-Ilan University
*
Address for correspondence: Joel Walters, Department of English, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan 52900, Israelwaltej49@gmail.com
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Abstract

Two studies investigated five- and six-year-old preschool children's narrative production in an attempt to show how LI may impinge on narrative production in measurable ways. Study 1 analyzed renderings of familiar stories for group (typical language development vs. language impairment), story content (Jungle Book/Goldilocks) and language (English/Hebrew) differences on a range of discourse (story grammar categories), lexical (e.g., words, word types), morphosyntactic (e.g., verb inflections, prepositions) and bilingual (code-switching) measures. It showed intact performance for narrative structure in both groups and in both languages despite differences in lexis, morphosyntax and bilingualism. Study 2 pursued bilingual code-switching as a means to examine differences between children with typical language development (TLD) and language impairment (LI) in a retelling task where each child retold three stories (from native language/L1, second language/L2 and bilingual contexts) to interlocutors with different language preferences. Both groups showed sociolinguistic sensitivity in code-switching behavior, but frequency and directionality of code-switching revealed group differences. The article argues for the use of a range of indicators of LI including those unique to bilingual children.

Keywords

bilingual preschool childrennarrative abilitieslanguage impairmentcode-switching
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 15 , Special Issue 1: Bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment , January 2012 , pp. 58 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

*

The authors would like to thank Sharon Armon-Lotem, editor of this special issue, three anonymous reviewers, and the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 938) for its support.

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