Using Narratives to Assess Bilingual Children

Identifying a language difference versus a language disorder in young bilingual children is a challenging task for speech-language pathologists. Narrative assessments are increasingly employed in identifying bilingual students with language impairment. Research on dual language learners (DLLs) has shown that children achieve language competency in their second language (L2) first in narrative organization (macrostructure), then vocabulary, and last morphology (Paradis, 2016). Narrative tasks are often used to assess the language of schoolage children because they tap a range of functional language skills (as opposed to decontextualized language assessments that, for example, ask children to name pictures, point to pictures, and finish sentences). Narratives require a variety of receptive/comprehension language skills and expressive/production language skills. Children must be able to remember a story they hear and understand who the story characters were, what they did, and why; they must also be able to produce stories in which they coherently link ideas and organize those ideas around a common theme (Gillam & Pearson, 2004). Difficulty in performing these tasks is associated with language impairment (Tsimpli et al., 2016). A significant discrepancy between receptive and expressive ability has been a hallmark of language impairment (Gibson et al., 2018). Recent research indicates that a receptive–expressive gap occurs in vocabulary and semantic testing for bilingual children (Gibson et al., 2012, 2014b), but not with typically developing (TD) children; furthermore, the discrepancy is exacerbated for bilingual children with primary language impairment (PLI; Gibson et al., 2014a). Such a discrepancy would not be predicted in theory because standardized tests are designed based on normative research to yield outcomes that should be comparable. A newsletter dedicated to speech & language in school-age children