Narrative Tell and Retell in Mandarin-English Bilingual Children

PurposeSpeech-language pathologists often adopt narrative tasks to assess bilingual children’slanguage skills. However, limited research guides clinical decisions about elicitationmethod, assessment language, and interpretation of results for specific bilingualpopulations. The present study examined the impact of elicitation method (tell vs. retell)and language (Mandarin vs. English) on macro- and microstructure narrative skills inMandarin-English bilingual children.MethodNarrative tell and retell samples were elicited from 79 Mandarin-English bilingualchildren using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). Theeffects of elicitation method and language were analyzed for macro- andmicrostructure measures.ResultsFor macrostructure, children produced better narrative retells than tells across storystructure, story complexity, and number of internal state terms, with cross-linguisticdifferences only in story structure (Mandarin > English). Code-switching did notsignificantly impact macrostructure scores. For microstructure, a retell advantage wasfound across all measures (story length, lexical diversity, sentence length, andsyntactic complexity) in English, but only in story length and lexical diversity inMandarin. A post-hoc analysis revealed that the differential effect of elicitation methodon morphosyntactic outcomes between languages is likely due to linguistic differences.ConclusionsThis study highlighted distinct narrative patterns in Mandarin-English bilingual childrenacross languages and elicitation methods. Macrostructure was more modifiable whengiven a narrative model than microstructure and was stable across languages,although cultural factors may affect performance. Microstructure was languagespecific,with Mandarin morphosyntactic skills being the least malleable. These findingsoffer insights on clinicians’ narrative assessment practices when working withMandarin-English bilingual children.