A comparison of narrative skill in Spanish-English bilinguals and their functionally monolingual Spanish-speaking and English-only peers

Abstract

Purpose:

The Spanish and English narrative skills of young (mean age = 5.65 years) Spanish-English bilinguals were compared to functionally monolingual Spanish and English-only speakers’ narrative skills, respectively (n = 63).

Method:

Spanish and English oral retellings, elicited at the beginning and end of the kindergarten year, were transcribed and coded in terms of discourse- (story structure complexity), semantic- (word diversity) and grammatical-level (lexical and grammatical errors, revisions) skills.

Data and analysis:

Repeated measures ANOVAs, with Time (beginning-, end-of-year) and Language Status (bilingual and either functionally monolingual Spanish or English monolingual) or Language (English, Spanish) as factors, were used to compare children’s narratives in terms of story structure complexity, word diversity, errors and revisions. Pearson correlations examined the relation of revisions to word diversity and errors.

Results:

Time comparisons revealed significant gains in story structure complexity, with no statistically significant difference between bilinguals’ and monolinguals’ complexity scores. Bilinguals’ stories were also not different between English and Spanish. Yet, bilinguals included more errors in English than did English monolinguals, while engaging in a comparable number of revisions. Moreover, despite comparable error rates with Spanish monolinguals, bilinguals included more lexical and grammatical revisions in Spanish. Revisions and word diversity were positively correlated; no relation was found between revisions and errors.

Conclusions:

The relative differences in revisions between bilinguals’ and Spanish monolinguals’ narratives, versus English monolinguals’, highlight the linguistic strengths of bilinguals. In particular, bilinguals’ tendency to engage in revisions as they attempt to increase their language complexity, suggests that revisions require advanced linguistic knowledge, not language uncertainty.

Originality:

The children in this study were considered language minority learners in the United States. Moving past accounts of minority learners’ “low” performance on oral language and reading comprehension, our study findings reveal evidence of “advanced” linguistic knowledge for bilingual speakers.

Keywords

Narrative language development assessment Spanish

Language minority (LM) learners in the US—children whose primary home language is not English—are often characterized as underperforming on measures of reading comprehension, particularly in comparison to their English-only (EO) peers (National Assessment of Education Progress; NAEP, 2015). Given the link between reading comprehension and narrative ability (Dickinson & McCabe, 2001; Dickinson, McCabe, Anastasopoulos, Peisner-Feinberg, & Poe, 2003; Miller et al., 2006; Uccelli & Páez, 2007), efforts to improve struggling readers’ comprehension skills, both in research and practice, have focused on children’s oral narrative skill development (see review in Butler, Urrutia, Buenger, & Hunt, 2010). Like reading comprehension, the oral narrative is a complex language process that involves multiple and interrelated component skills, including discourse, semantic, and grammatical skills (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2005; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 2003). In particular, the oral retell (i.e. retelling a story aloud) involves skill in organizing a story (discourse: story structure) as well as word knowledge (semantic) and knowledge about word order and grammatical rules (grammatical). Therefore, investigating the oral narrative skills of LM learners has the potential to provide insight into the skills that are sources of strengths or challenges in later reading.

Despite the utility of narrative production in informing reading instruction and intervention efforts, there remains a scarcity of research studies investigating LM learners’ narrative development (Bedore, Fiestas, Peña, & Nagy, 2006; Gámez, Lesaux, & Rizzo, 2016; Lucero, 2015, 2018; Melzi, Schick, & Bostwick, 2013; Pearson, 2002; Uccelli & Páez, 2007). Moreover, despite LM learners representing a heterogeneous group with respect to the balance of their English and native language skills (e.g. ranging from being functionally monolingual to bilingual), few existing studies consider the role of level of bilingualism on LM learners’ narrative skills (see Pearson, 2002). Thus, questions remain regarding LM learners’ narrative strengths and challenges as well as the unique attributes of their bilingual development. Designed to advance the theoretical and empirical base on narrative development, the present study investigates narrative production in young LM learners. Specifically, we compare bilingual LM learners’ narratives between English and Spanish, as well as to their functionally monolingual Spanish-speaking LM learners’ and monolingual English peers’ narratives, respectively, focusing primarily on their discourse, semantic, and grammatical skills.

Discourse skills in LM learners: Story structure complexity

The preschool years represent a rapid period of discourse development, particularly in terms of story structure, which refers to the structure that stories follow (e.g. Berman & Slobin, 1994; McCabe & Peterson, 1991; Mandler & Johnson, 1977). Although story structure is defined in different ways in the developmental literature, there is a consensus that a well-structured story is organized around a character’s goal or problem, attempts to meet a goal and a resolution (i.e. setting and episode; Stein & Glenn, 1979). The existing literature on narrative development, primarily focused on EO children, shows that story structure becomes more complex with age, with children including an increasing number of story elements in their narratives (Stein, 1988; Stein & Glenn, 1982).

There is a burgeoning interest in LM learners’ narrative development, and the existing research in this area highlights their story structure development as a linguistic strength. For example, similar to what has been shown for their EO peers (Applebee, 1978; Hudson & Shapiro, 1991), LM learners’ story structure in English increases in terms of complexity as they age (Muñoz, Gillam, Peña, & Gulley-Faehnle, 2003). In fact, by early adolescence, there are few differences in terms of the complexity of story structure in English between these learners and their EO peers (Gámez et al., 2016; Pearson, 2002).

The studies that include an investigation of LM learners’ Spanish skills, in addition to English skills, also show a developmental increase in story structure complexity in Spanish, starting in preschool (Fiestas & Peña, 2004; Lucero, 2015, 2018; Melzi et al., 2013; Squires et al., 2014; Uccelli & Páez, 2007). In particular, Melzi and colleagues (2013) tracked Spanish-speaking LM learners’ narrative development in preschool and assessed story structure complexity in the dominant language, Spanish or English. Their study findings showed that older children (5-year-olds) constructed more complex narratives than did younger children (4-year-olds); this was the case whether children told narratives in Spanish or English. While the majority of narrative studies involving LM learners typically do not include Spanish monolingual comparison groups, it is worth noting that cross-cultural studies involving monolingual Spanish speakers similarly show an increase in Spanish story structure complexity with age (Strömqvist & Verhoeven, 2004; Verhoeven & Strömqvist, 2001).

In addition, the existing studies investigating across-language performance in LM learners suggest that story structure complexity may vary between their two languages as a function of whether or not they receive bilingual input and opportunities to use both languages. In their study of narrative development in kindergarten through first grade, Uccelli and Páez (2007) found greater story structure complexity in LM learners’ English than Spanish narratives. In contrast, Fiestas and Peña’s (2004) study involving similarly aged LM learners (4- to ~7-year-olds) showed comparable story structure complexity across Spanish and English (see also Pearson, 2002). Of note, this latter study showing that story structure is invariant between languages included a group of bilingually instructed LM learners. That is, unlike Uccelli and Páez’s (2007) study, all of the children in Fiestas and Peña’s (2004) study received exposure to and used both of their languages in school. The differences in the make-up of the LM samples in the extant narrative literature, including in terms of language exposure and usage levels, highlight the complex interplay of factors that may influence narrative performance in LM learners.

In sum, the existing studies on LM learners’ narrative skills suggest two developmental trends in story structure complexity, specifically for bilingual learners. First, story structure complexity is expected to be comparable across bilingual LM learners’ two languages, particularly if they use and are exposed to approximately equal amounts of their two languages. Second, for bilingual LM learners, story structure complexity in English and Spanish is expected to be similar to their monolingual peers’. Yet, without a direct comparison between monolingual and bilingual LM learners’ narratives longitudinally, in English and Spanish, the role of level of bilingualism on narrative development remains unclear. Thus, to contribute to the field’s understanding of the relation of level of bilingualism to early narrative skill in young LM learners, we compare bilingual learners’ story structure complexity between English and Spanish as well as to their monolingual English peers’ and functionally monolingual Spanish peers’ narratives across the kindergarten year.

Semantic and grammatical skills in LM learners

Narrative studies that have included an analysis of LM learners’ semantic and grammatical skills suggest these are promising areas of study to uncover the unique attributes of bilingual language learning (Bedore et al., 2006; Byrd, Bedore, & Ramos, 2015). For example, the linguistic forms and behaviors used to tell a story aloud may reflect not only speakers’ overt lexical and syntactic choices, but also the underlying cognitive processes of language production. That is, from the perspective of a widely accepted and influential model of language production (de Bot, 1992; Levelt, 1989; Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999), the oral retell involves not only conceptualizing an idea (i.e. conceptualization: nonlinguistic representation of intended messages), but also translating concepts into linguistic forms (i.e. formulation: lexical and grammatical planning), even before articulating speech (i.e. articulation: execution of articulatory plan). Moreover, the model proposes that at each stage, speakers engage in self-monitoring (e.g. during word retrieval or construction of grammar), which may compromise the fluidity of their language production. For example, speakers may revise their speech in order to modify their original message. Loban (1979) referred to these disruptions in speech as “linguistic maze” behaviors, which include revisions (made to any part of a word or utterance), repetitions, and filled pauses like “uh” and “um” (MacLachlan & Chapman, 1988; Wiese, 1984).

Levelt (1989) proposed that these maze behaviors are a reflection of linguistic uncertainty that arises from the demands of language production. Bedore and colleagues (Bedore et al., 2006; Byrd et al., 2015) further explain that bilinguals may use each of their languages relatively less than their monolingual peers do because they are negotiating two language systems, and thus, have more linguistic uncertainty. Indeed, previous studies show greater use of mazes by bilinguals in their second language, but also more variability in maze use (Lofranco, Peña, & Bedore, 2006), in comparison to monolinguals in that language (Lennon, 1990; Poulisse, 1999; Wiese, 1984).

However, a recent narrative study with 4- to 6-year-old LM learners who were bilingual in Spanish and English, showed comparable rates and patterns of maze use to their monolingual peers (Spanish, English) (Bedore et al., 2006). Of note, the bilinguals in that study showed greater rates of maze production in Spanish than English. At the time of testing, the bilinguals, on average, had equal amounts of exposure to and use of English and Spanish, though the authors noted a wide range in exposure and output values. In addition, their total years of exposure to Spanish was, on average, higher (~3) than their exposure to English (~2). These findings indicating greater maze production in Spanish—the language that the children were exposed to longer—suggest that maze production does not necessarily reflect linguistic uncertainty.

In contrast to the notion that maze production reflects language uncertainty, some have argued that revisions reflect an attempt at being accurate, which requires advanced linguistic knowledge (Gass & Selinker, 2008; Kormos, 1999). In a recent study of maze use and narrative production in adolescence, Gámez et al. (2016) found that adolescent LM learners who self-reported equal exposure and use of Spanish and English, produced more grammatical revisions in English than their monolingual English peers. Specifically, the bilinguals in that study who had “advanced” levels of English proficiency were more likely to exhibit grammatical revisions than were bilinguals with “lower-than-advanced” performance. The bilinguals with lower-than-advanced performance included more grammatical errors than their bilingual peers with advanced language proficiency as well as their EO counterparts. The authors posited that hearing and speaking two languages on a regular basis resulted in more metalinguistic knowledge (Bialystok, Craik, Green, & Gollan, 2009) and thus, bilinguals with advanced language proficiency readily recognized linguistic breakdowns that required grammatical revisions (Bedore et al., 2006; Gámez et al., 2016; Kormos, 1999). In addition, bilinguals with lower-than advanced proficiency may not have recognized when revisions were needed (i.e. increased errors).

In fact, mazes, particularly revisions, have been found to be positively correlated with semantic measures, including a variety of lexical diversity measures such as the number of different words (NDW) in a narrative (Bedore et al., 2006; Gámez et al., 2016). It is generally assumed that NDW is a good indicator of vocabulary size and productivity (Bedore et al., 2006) and as such, the association between NDW and revisions indicates that children with larger productive vocabularies engage in more revisions. Thus, the association between revisions and NDW provides evidence that revisions in speech require advanced linguistic knowledge. In contrast, an association between error rates and revisions would provide evidence that revisions reflect language uncertainty. Yet, given that few studies have attempted to disentangle the role of language knowledge in the production of mazes, the interpretation of these findings remains uncertain. Thus, to further inform this debate about whether increased maze use signals advanced linguistic knowledge, or linguistic uncertainty, we investigate the relation of NDW to one particular type of maze, specifically, revisions, as well as to error rates in the bilinguals’ two languages.

Present study

In the present study, we examined the Spanish and English narrative skills of bilingual LM learners as well as functionally monolingual Spanish-speaking LM learners’ and English speakers’ narrative skills (Spanish, English), respectively, over the kindergarten year. Guided by the existing literature on LM learners’ narrative skills, we compared children on the discourse (story structure), semantic (word diversity) and grammatical (errors and revisions) skills used to retell a story aloud. To elicit oral retells, we used a wordless animated cartoon instead of relying on the often-used Frog, Where Are You? book series (Mayer, 1969) (Bedore et al., 2006; Lucero, 2015; Squires et al., 2014). The decision to use an animated cartoon over a book format was motivated by the goal of promoting the narration of a story and minimizing children’s descriptions of individual pictures.

As noted, despite the commonality of speaking a minority language in the US (e.g. Spanish), LM learners represent a heterogeneous group, particularly with respect to the balance of their English and native language skills. For example, LM learners may be classified as either bilingual (~equal exposure to and use of two languages) or functionally monolingual (majority exposure to and use of only one language). Thus, to determine language status in this study, we assessed children’s home language exposure and use. Bilingual children had equal exposure and use of Spanish and English at home, whereas functionally monolingual Spanish-speaking children had majority exposure to and use of Spanish. In addition, we used children’s performance on a standardized measure of vocabulary (M = 100; SD = 15) as a selection criterion for sampling bilinguals who were comparable on English and Spanish vocabulary skills.

In addition, there are no educational programs designed specifically for the larger category of LM students. Those classified as an English Language Learner (ELL), either at the state or federal level, may receive mandated language services, which vary across states and districts (Lesaux & Snow, 2012). For example, enrollment in a transitional bilingual education (TBE) program—a common bilingual program type—offers native language instruction, along with English. Thus, to be in line with current US demographics, our recruitment efforts consisted of sampling—at the start of the school year—functionally monolingual Spanish speakers and Spanish-English bilinguals from Spanish-English TBE classrooms. In an effort to make valid comparisons between bilinguals and monolinguals, we also sampled Spanish-English bilinguals and monolingual English speakers from classrooms that provided only English instruction. This sampling method called for an investigation of children’s language skills across time. Thus, the following two research questions guide this study: 1) How does story structure complexity in Spanish-English bilingual children compare between their two languages and to their functionally monolingual Spanish-speaking and English-only peers’ over time? 2) How do the oral narratives of Spanish-English bilingual children compare between their two languages and to their functionally monolingual Spanish-speaking and English-only peers’ over time, in particular, in terms of their word diversity, errors and revisions?

Method

Participants

Sixty-three kindergarteners (M age = 5.65 years; male = 34; female = 29) in the Midwest US participated in this study. Converging sources of data were used to classify children as either Spanish-English bilingual (n = 21: female = 12, male = 9, M age = 5.63 years, SD = .28), functionally monolingual Spanish (n = 21: female = 8, male = 13, M age = 5.71 years, SD = .29) or English monolingual (n = 21: female = 9, male = 12, M age = 5.63 years, SD = .35); the groups did not differ by age (ps > .05). Teachers identified children’s home language background as either “English only” or “a language other than English.” They also confirmed either the language of instruction used in their classroom as “only English” or that their classroom operated under an early-exit TBE program where, typically, between 80–90% of instruction is provided in Spanish and 10–20% in English. Teachers also confirmed that none of the children included in this study were receiving special education or language services. This is important to note given the present study’s focus on maze behaviors, an overproduction of which is related to clinically diagnosed disfluencies in speech (Byrd et al., 2015). In addition, parents filled out a demographics questionnaire, which was used to determine children’s ethnic background and home language. Parents’ responses to home language questions (n = 12), on a scale of (5) only English to (1) only Spanish, were used to gauge children’s language use with (n = 6) and exposure provided by (n = 6) their mother, father, younger and older siblings, friends, and other adults at home.

As Table 1 (Part A) shows, children were deemed Spanish-English bilinguals for the purposes of this study if 1) they were identified by teachers as using a language other than English at home, 2) their parents reported equal amounts of home language exposure and use (combined exposure and use range = 2.25 to 3.75), and 3) were able to perform the language tasks in this study in both English and Spanish. In fact, bilingual children were reported to use equal amounts of English and Spanish with all of their interlocutors (usage range = 2.5 to 3.6). All bilinguals were identified as Latino and approximately half were selected from classrooms that provided only English instruction (n = 10) and the other half from TBE classrooms (n = 11).

Table 1.

Children’s home language and standardized vocabulary scores.

	Bilingual	Spanish monolingual	English monolingual
Part A: Home Language
Exposure	2.77 (.50)	1.25 (.21)	4.88 (.17)
Use	2.96 (.63)	1.20 (.21)	5.00 (.00)
Combined	2.88 (.50)	1.23 (.17)	4.94 (.08)
Part B: Standardized vocabulary
Spanish
Beginning-of-year	80.37 (13.21)	83.15 (18.89)	–
End-of-year	84.57 (20.95)	101.05 (19.15)	–
English
Beginning-of-year	80.03 (13.99)	–	105.25 (13.97)
End-of-year	84.35 (18.41)	–	106.00 (15.07)

Note. The home language questions were on a 5-point scale where low values indicate a greater preference for Spanish, middle values indicate a preference for both Spanish and English, and high values indicate a greater preference for English; Home language respondents for the English monolingual group = 8; Standardized vocabulary scores refer to children’s standard scores on the Picture Vocabulary and Vocabulario Sobre Dibujos subtests of the WLPB-R (M = 100; SD = 15); SD in parentheses.

Monolingual and functionally monolingual children were only able to complete the language tasks used in this study in one language (either English or Spanish); these children could not answer the practice/first few items of the standardized assessments. In addition, children were classified as functionally monolingual Spanish if 1) their teachers identified them as using a language other than English at home (in this case, Spanish), and 2) they were reported by their parents to use and be exposed to approximately “only Spanish” (combined input and output range = 1 to 1.5), which is in line with previous studies with functionally monolingual Spanish speakers in the US (Bedore et al., 2006). In fact, functionally monolingual Spanish speakers were reported to use only Spanish with all of their interlocutors (usage ≤ 1.21), except friends, with whom they were reported to use “mainly Spanish” (M = 1.75, SD = 0.97). In line with current US demographic trends in TBE programs, the functionally monolingual Spanish speakers were identified as Latino and were selected from TBE classrooms. To be classified as English monolingual, children’s teachers needed to identify them as EO and their classrooms as including only English instruction. The majority of children in the English monolingual group were Caucasian (n = 10), followed by Latino (n = 7). One child was identified as African American and three were identified as mixed (African American and Latino = 1, Caucasian and Latino = 2).

Participants were selected from returned parental consent forms. Our recruitment efforts consisted of distributing parental consent forms across 24 kindergarten classrooms in schools serving a primarily low-income (eligible for free/reduced price lunch M = 91%, SD = 11.46%) and Latino student population (M = 90%, SD = 9.52%) (Interactive Illinois Report Card, 2014). This led to oversampling TBE classrooms (n = 17). Thus, additional selection criteria were imposed in order to arrive at an equal number of participants per group; 21 was the number of monolingual English speakers in the original sample. We removed the lowest quartile of vocabulary standard scores for the Spanish-speaking groups (bilingual n = 36, monolingual n = 31) at the fall testing point (SS cut-point = 60), which approximated 2.5 SDs below the national average (M = 100, SD = 15). This resulted in 21 Spanish-English bilinguals, and 24 monolingual Spanish speakers, three of whom were randomly excluded from the final sample. This also resulted in a Spanish monolingual group that more closely matched the English monolingual group, at least by the end of the year (Table 1: Part B), and a bilingual group with comparable English and Spanish scores, both at the beginning, t(20) = 0.095, p = .925, 95% CI [–7.13, 7.81], d = 0.025, and end of the school year, t(20) = 0.030, p < .001, 95% CI [-14.86, 15.30], d = 0.011. In particular, the monolingual groups scored slightly higher than the national average of 100, at least by the end of the school year, whereas the bilinguals scored about 1 SD below the national average, in both English and Spanish.

Measures

Standardized vocabulary assessment

Children’s vocabulary skills were assessed using the English and Spanish versions of the Picture Vocabulary subtests of the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery-Revised (WLPB-R; Woodcock, 1991). The Picture Vocabulary subtest (58 total items) requires children to provide a label for pictured items, though the first couple of questions require the child to point to a picture for which a label has been named. The subtest yields raw scores that were converted to standard scores (norming sample M = 100, SD = 15) using the Woodcock Compuscore and Program Profiles software program. The publisher reports internal consistency reliability coefficients of .86.

Oral narrative production

Oral narrative production was elicited using two approximately 1-minute non-verbal animated cartoons (English, Spanish) centered around a small mouse and his friends, a duck and an elephant (see http://www.diemaus.de). These cartoons were chosen because we expected them to be unfamiliar to children in the US and thus, present novel story lines. In addition, the particular two cartoons chosen for use in this study matched in terms of the number of lexical items (n = 5) as well as story-level elements, which measure story structure complexity (Stein & Glenn, 1979). That is, they were comparable in that there was reference to a protagonist, desires/goals, an action, and a consequence. The events in the cartoon assigned to elicit English narratives involve a duck playing in a mud puddle and splashing his friends, who get dirty with mud (visible lexical items: duck, elephant, mouse, mud and plant). The events in the cartoon assigned to elicit Spanish narratives involve a mouse trying to open a gift box that contains his friend, who presents him with flowers (visible lexical items = mouse, elephant, flowers, box, and bow).

Procedure

Children’s 1) vocabulary (WLPB-R), and 2) narrative production skills were assessed (in consecutive order), in English and Spanish, at the beginning and end of the school year. The assessments were individually administered in the hallway of their schools when no other children were present. As a way to ensure their bilingual or functionally monolingual status, all children were first assessed in English and then, if necessary, in Spanish one week later. As noted previously, testing confirmed that monolingual speakers could not complete these tasks in the other language at the time of enrollment into this study. It is also worth noting that assessments were administered in English before Spanish to ensure that all children comprehended the tasks—given the US context, it is reasonable to expect that the monolingual Spanish speakers would have had some exposure to English, hence our use of the term functionally monolingual over monolingual.

Specific details related to the administration of the Picture Vocabulary subtests of the WLPB-R can be found in the instructor’s manual and thus, only the oral narrative production task is detailed. To elicit the narratives, the experimenter sat next to the child in front of a laptop computer and explained, in either English or Spanish, depending on the language of assessment, that they would play a storytelling game together. The child was told that after watching a cartoon, it would be the child’s turn to retell the story and then answer some questions about what happened in the story. Before hitting the “play” button, the experimenter identified the story characters’ names (“Maus, Ellie, Duck”) and objects from a still picture that appeared on the screen. When the cartoon finished playing, the experimenter said, “Can you tell me the story, as much as you remember?” Children were prompted with questions, including “Can you tell me what happened?” if the child did not respond. The experimenter also asked “Anything else?” and if the child indicated a “no” response, then the retelling was considered complete. Children’s storytelling was audiotaped and transcribed as detailed next.

Story transcription

The resulting oral narratives (fall, spring; English, Spanish) were transcribed using the CHAT (Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts) conventions of CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System; MacWhinney, 2010), a standardized transcription system for analyzing child speech. This system marks mazes either as filled pauses (e.g. uh, um, etc.), false starts/repetitions (e.g. “&ele elephant”), or revisions, including recasts (e.g. “first the duck went <into the &pon(d)> [//] into the mud”) or complete reformulations (e.g. “<then the duck say &hi> [///] um he was all dirty.”). The narrative was then segmented into clauses, which were defined as linguistic units that contain a subject and predicate (verb-phrase and accompanying elements) (Berman & Slobin, 1994). Of note, we included cases in which the child excluded a verb if they did not constitute a maze (i.e. no interruption as defined above) and treated them as descriptions and these all included characters (e.g. “A mouse.”).

Story coding and deriving language measures

Story length and word diversity

Given that the clause was the unit of analysis, the number of clauses that made up each transcript served as a measure of story length (Clauses). In addition, the program FREQ in the CLAN (Computerized Language Analysis) software program of the CHAT system (MacWhinney, 2010) was used to derive the NDW; word roots without inflection), which served as a measure of word diversity. Specifically, in order to account for the different morphological systems in English and Spanish, the resulting word lists from the FREQ program were used to calculate the number of unique, uninflected lexemes in each transcript (Lucero, 2015; Miller et al., 2006; Simon-Cereijido & Gutiérrez-Clellen, 2009). Following the guidelines proposed by Bedore et al. (2010), verb forms in Spanish were linked to their word roots (“nadó” and “nadando” were linked to “nadar” [to swim]) as were noun plural forms (“amigos”, “amigo” [friend]). Diminutive forms (e.g. “ratoncito”) were marked as different than their non-diminutive word forms (e.g. “ratón”) and gendered forms of words (masculine vs. feminine) were marked as different words. In English, verbs (“falling” and “fell” were linked to “fall”), plurals and possessives were linked to their word roots.

Narrative structure

Children’s narratives were manually coded for the inclusion of the following narrative structure elements: characters/setting, initiating event, internal response, plan, action/attempt, complication, consequence, and ending (see Petersen, Gillam, & Gillam, 2008; Fiestas & Peña, 2004). The characters and setting component includes an introduction to the main characters and context of the story (e.g. “there was a mouse at a birthday party”). An initiating event refers a statement of the problem (e.g. “he saw a box bouncing around”). Thinking or feeling statements refer to an internal response (e.g. “he was surprised to see the box”). A plan must include a cognitive verb reference indicating a plan to achieve aims (e.g. “the mouse thought it would be a good idea to open the box”). The action/attempt component includes any actions by the main characters and/or attempts taken to solve the problem (e.g. “he tried to open the box.”). A complication is an event that prohibits the action from being accomplished (e.g. “the box wouldn’t open”). An outcome or the result of the action attempt refers to a consequence (e.g. “he shook it and the elephant came out”). An ending is a resolution of the problem or a summary statement (e.g. “the elephant gave him flowers and they were all happy”). Raters identified whether these elements were included in the stories and assigned a code of either 1 or 0 (presence or absence) for each element, with a maximum score of 8.

Errors

In line with the coding schemes laid out by Peña and colleagues (Bedore, Peña, Gillam, & Ho, 2010; Fiestas & Peña, 2004) and Gámez et al. (2015), errors that occurred outside of mazes were coded as either lexical or grammatical. Given the differences in the varieties of Spanish and English spoken in the US, we used Peña and colleagues’ (Bedore, Pena, Gillam, & Ho 2010) preset lists of English and Spanish errors because the background of the child samples in those studies closely matched ours; children were reported to be of Mexican background (Fiestas & Peña, 2004, p. 159). Grammatical errors were coded as such when they involved the omission or incorrect use of morphemes, that is, material that contributes grammatical information to the clause. These were errors in word order or incorrect use/exclusion of function words, including articles, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, prepositions, or inflections (comparison, number, case, gender, tense, or aspect). In English, clauses that excluded a noun (“wet the mud”) were coded as grammatical errors. This was not the case for Spanish narratives as the noun and pronoun can be encoded in the verb. Clauses that excluded a required main verb were also coded as including a grammatical error. Lexical errors were coded as such when they contributed meaning beyond grammatical information, including incorrect usage of base words (i.e. nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs).

We considered the number of changes required to make clauses lexically/grammatically correct and assigned the error code that would lead to the fewest number of changes (e.g. “and then Duck dirty elephant” = and then Duck dirtied the elephant (two changes: grammatical, inflection error, past tense; grammatical, article) ≠ and then Duck got the elephant dirty (three changes: grammatical, verb; grammatical, article; grammatical, word order). To do so, we took into account the discourse context, but not any material in mazes. To further minimize double error coding, we noted phonological mispronunciations and excluded them from the error counts (e.g. then they wiped it on the skween = screen). For each participant, we calculated the number of errors and the percentage of each error type by diving the number of errors for each type by the total number of errors.

Lexical and grammatical revisions

Following the coding scheme of Bedore et al. (2006), we conducted an exhaustive coding of maze behaviors, including coding for filled pauses, repetition/false starts, and lexical as well as grammatical revisions (i.e. recasts and reformulations). However, unlike Bedore and colleagues (2006), we did not code for connectors because there was minimal variation in the type of connectors used, with the majority of utterances starting with the connectors “and” in English and “y” in Spanish. Guided by previous findings of a difference between bilingual and monolingual groups on the number of mazes, in particular, lexical and grammatical revisions (Gámez et al., 2016), we derived two total scores for this category: the total number of mazes and the total number of lexical and grammatical revisions. In addition, we calculated the proportion of lexical and grammatical revisions as the total number of revisions over the total number of clauses.

Reliability

The transcribers were native Spanish-English bilinguals who had received extensive transcription training (MacWhinney, 2010). Each of the transcripts was also reviewed in full and checked for accuracy by an independent and reliable transcriber who reached 90% agreement on independently transcribed test files. To establish reliability for coding, 15% of the transcripts were independently coded by two research assistants; percent agreement between two independent coders reached 86% for errors in English, 88% for errors in Spanish and 96% for mazes in English and 97% for mazes in Spanish. Agreement for story structure coding was excellent in English, Cohen’s k = .916, and Spanish, Cohen’s k = .957.

Data analysis plan

The analyses centered on comparing bilingual children’s discourse (story structure complexity), semantic (word diversity) and grammatical (errors, revisions) skills across their two languages as well as to that of their functionally monolingual Spanish or English monolingual peers’, in Spanish or English, respectively. As noted, while our main interest was to compare these three groups at the start of the school year, our participant sampling method called for an investigation of children’s narratives across time. Thus, to answer our first research question investigating children’s story structure complexity over time, we relied on repeated measures ANOVAs. For comparisons between English and Spanish in bilinguals, we included Language (English, Spanish) as the between-subjects factor and Time (beginning-, end-of-year) as the within-subjects factor. For comparisons between language groups, we swapped Language Status (bilingual and either functionally monolingual Spanish or English monolingual) for the Language variable. To answer our second research question investigating semantic and grammatical skills over time, we conducted separate repeated measures ANOVAs (Time) for semantic (Clauses, Word Diversity) and grammatical (Errors, Revisions) outcome scores.

Given the sampling of students from different program types, we further probed all significant bilingual-monolingual differences with within-sample comparisons using the bilinguals’ Language of Instruction (TBE vs. EO) as the between-subject factor; this was done in order to rule out differences as a function of language of instruction. As a follow-up to these main analyses, we compared the two monolingual groups (functionally monolingual Spanish, monolingual English) in order to rule out any inherent differences in storytelling between Spanish and English and as such, comprehensively assessed the role of bilingualism on discourse, semantic, and grammatical skills in narrative production.

Results

Research question #1: Story structure complexity comparisons by language status

Story structure complexity in bilinguals

Table 2 shows that the overall narrative structure complexity score (# of story elements) for bilinguals was approximately 3.5 in Spanish and English, with a change in scores of about 1 story element in Spanish and about a third in English from the beginning to the end of the year. Specifically, the majority of bilingual children added characters/settings (Spanish = 100%, English = 100%), actions/attempts (Spanish = 81%, English = 86%) and initiating events (Spanish = 76%, English = 86%). By the end of the year, all bilingual children added characters/settings, action/attempts, and initiating events, except for one child who did not add this latter element in English (95%). No other element was included by all of the bilingual children (Spanish range = 0% to 48%, English range = 0% to 34%). A repeated measures ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of Time (1, 20) = 14.750, p < .05, but not Language, indicating that bilinguals exhibited growth in story structure complexity over the school year, with comparable complexity scores across their two languages.

Table 2.

Children’s narrative structure scores and language features by language and testing session.

	Bilingual	Spanish monolingual	English monolingual
Spanish Language Features
Beginning-of-year
Narrative Structure	3.05 (1.36)	3.33 (0.97)	–
Clauses	5.86 (1.90)	5.67 (2.80)	–
NDW	17.48 (6.81)	18.90 (6.34)	–
Errors	2.86 (1.80)	1.86 (1.35)	–
Mazes	6.10 (3.65)	5.00 (5.27)	–
Revisions	.30 (.26)	.14 (.17)	–
End-of-year
Narrative Structure	4.05 (1.07)	3.90 (1.22)	–
Clauses	5.81 (2.54)	6.10 (2.23)	–
NDW	18.00 (6.25)	20.24 (5.78)	–
Errors	2.95 (2.71)	1.67 (1.77)	–
Mazes	6.52 (3.79)	5.67 (5.18)	–
Revisions	.28 (.22)	.15 (.21)	–
English Language Features
Beginning-of-year
Narrative Structure	3.24 (1.18)		3.76 (1.00)
Clauses	7.62 (5.50)		6.38 (3.06)
NDW	18.00 (11.94)		21.52 (10.21)
Errors	4.19 (2.98)		1.76 (1.70)
Mazes	5.33 (3.76)		5.95 (3.81)
Revisions	.19 (.23)		.22 (.23)
End-of-year
Narrative Structure	3.90 (1.22)		4.52 (1.40)
Clauses	8.05 (4.81)		8.38 (4.10)
NDW	18.76 (9.90)		24.00 (8.73)
Errors	3.76 (3.06)		2.10 (1.64)
Mazes	6.29 (5.18)		7.95 (6.65)
Revisions	.32 (.54)		.22 (.18)

Note. NDW = Number of different words; Revisions represent the proportion of clauses that include a maze that is a lexical or grammatical revision.

To rule out differences by language of instruction, we also compared narrative complexity scores, in English and Spanish, for a random sample of bilinguals enrolled in TBE to bilinguals in EO classrooms. Separate repeated measures ANOVAs with English and Spanish scores as the outcome variables similarly revealed a significant main effect of Time for narrative complexity scores in English, F(1, 18) = 7.111, p = .016, η_p² = .283 and Spanish, F(1, 18) = 28.174, p < .001, η_p² = .610. These analyses did not reveal any significant effects including the variable Language of Instruction (p > .05). Thus, bilinguals evidenced growth in narrative structure scores, regardless of program type.

Story structure complexity comparisons between bilinguals and monolinguals

As Table 2 also shows, the overall narrative structure score was about 4 for the monolingual English group and 3.5 for the functionally monolingual Spanish group. In addition, both monolingual groups added less than one story element by the end of the year. A repeated measures ANOVA with narrative structure scores in Spanish as the outcome revealed only a main effect of Time, F(1, 40) = 17.489, p < .01, η_p² = .304, but no main effect or interaction effect including the Language Status variable (ps > .05), indicating that both the functionally monolingual Spanish and bilingual groups grew in terms of their narrative structure in Spanish, with no statistical difference between the groups’ number of story elements. Also, a repeated measures ANOVA with narrative structure scores in English as the outcome revealed a main effect of Time, F(1, 40) = 9.474, p = .004, η_p² = .191, but no main effect or interaction effect including Language Status (ps > .05). These results also indicate that both the monolingual English and bilingual groups grew in terms of narrative structure complexity, with no significant difference between the groups in terms of the number of story elements.

Research question #2: Semantic and grammatical skill comparisons by language status

Semantic and grammatical skill in bilinguals

Bilingual children’s stories were comparable between English and Spanish in terms of semantic and grammatical-level skills (see Table 2); this was the case at both the beginning and end of the year. Specifically, bilinguals’ English and Spanish stories did not differ in terms of word diversity; stories included about 18 root words (M overall = 17.61, SE = 1.02). In addition, bilinguals included about 3 errors in Spanish and 4 in English (M overall = 3.98, SE = .48) and engaged in approximately 1.5 revisions (M overall = 1.54, SE = .19) in English and Spanish. Spanish stories were constructed using about 6 clauses, while English stories were constructed using about 8 clauses (M overall = 6.83, SD = 5.01). The results of separate repeated measures ANOVAs did not reveal any significant effects of Time or Language (ps > .05), indicating comparable story length, word diversity, errors and revisions between the two languages and across time.

Semantic and grammatical skill comparisons between bilinguals and monolinguals

While there were no statistically significant differences between the bilingual group’s two languages, we did find a significant difference in terms of semantic and grammatical skills between bilinguals and monolinguals. In particular, despite committing a similar number of errors in Spanish as did their Spanish monolingual peers (M = 2.31, SE = .17), the bilingual group engaged in more revisions. Bilinguals included about 2 lexical/grammatical revisions (30% of clauses) and the Spanish monolingual group used less than 1 (15% of clauses). In fact, a repeated measures ANOVA with # of Revisions (Spanish) as the outcome variable revealed a significant main effect of Language Status, F(1, 40) = 12.470, p = .001, η_p² = .238, and no effects including Time (ps > .05), indicating that Spanish monolinguals and bilinguals differed in terms of revisions in Spanish at both time points. However, we did not find a significant difference between the bilinguals’ lexical and grammatical revisions, as a function of Language of Instruction, at either the beginning, F(1, 18) = .446, p > .05, η_p² = .024, or end of the year, F(1, 18) = 3.00, p > .05, η_p² = .143.

Moreover, while the bilingual group engaged in a similar number of revisions in English as their English monolingual peers did (M = 1.45, SE = .18), the bilingual group included more errors in their stories. Specifically, bilinguals included over 1.5 more errors in English at the end of the year and 2.5 more errors at the beginning of the year in comparison to their English monolingual peers. In fact, a repeated measures ANOVA with Errors as the outcome variable revealed a significant main effect of Language Status, F(1, 40) = 14.158, p = .001, η_p² = .261, and no effects including Time, indicating a significant difference in terms of bilinguals’ and English monolinguals’ errors at both time points, with no change over time. Table 3, which displays the percentage of each groups’ error type, indicates that inflectional affixes were the majority of bilingual and English monolingual children’s errors in English, at both time points. Bilingual children made more of these types of errors. Of note, there were no significant differences in errors between the bilinguals, as a function of their Language of Instruction, at either the beginning, F(1, 18) = 1.547, p > .05, η_p² = .079, or end of the year, F(1, 18) = 1.344, p > .05, η_p² = .069. Moreover, separate repeated measures ANOVAs did not reveal significant differences between bilinguals and monolinguals in terms of the number of clauses and word diversity (ps > .05).

Table 3.

Percentage of English errors by language group and testing session.

Type of Error	Bilingual		EO
	Time I	Time II	Time I	Time II
Inflectional Affixes	27%	39%	36%	53%
Verbs	26%	11%	18%	17%
Prepositions	15%	11%	6%	11%
Pronouns/Nouns	8%	16%	24%	6%
Articles	3%	11%	9%	2%
Conjunctions	4%	1%	0%	0%

Note. EO = English-only Speaker; Time I = Beginning of the year; Time II = End of the year; Percentage refers to the number of errors in a particular category over the total number of errors (EO Time I = 33; EO Time II = 47; Bilingual Time I = 117; Bilingual Time II = 95).

Relations between word diversity, errors and revisions

Pearson correlations were performed between measures of semantic and grammatical skills in Spanish and English. At both time points, bilinguals’ use of lexical and grammatical revisions was related to NDW in a positive direction; Table 4 displays the results for the beginning of the year. That is, bilinguals who included more lexical and grammatical revisions were also more likely to construct stories with greater word diversity in Spanish and English (ps < .05). A positive association between NDW and revisions was also found for functionally monolingual Spanish speakers and English monolinguals (ps < .05). However, there was no significant relation between revisions and the number of errors for either bilinguals or monolinguals (ps > .05). Together, these associations point to a connection between bilinguals’ use of revisions and their advanced linguistic knowledge (NDW), not language uncertainty (errors).

Table 4.

Correlations between semantic and grammatical skills.

	Errors		NDW		Revisions
Monolingual
Errors	–	–	0.167	–	–.354	–
Errors	–	–	–	.019		–.229
NDW	–	–	–	–	0.522*	–
NDW	–	–	–	–	–	0.468*
Bilingual
Errors	–	–	0.063	–	–0.025	–
Errors	–	–	–	0.383		–.008
NDW	–	–	–	–	0.496*	–
NDW	–	–	–	–	–	0.543*

Note. Gray cells represent Spanish measures; White cells represent English measures. Functionally monolingual Spanish speakers contributed monolingual data in Spanish (gray cells); English monolinguals contributed monolingual data in English (white cells). Bilinguals contributed data in both Spanish and English.

p < .05.

Follow-up analyses: Discourse, semantic and grammatical skill comparisons between functionally monolingual Spanish and English-only speakers

Story structure complexity

The narrative complexity score (see Table 2) was about 4 for the monolingual English group and 3.5 for the functionally monolingual Spanish group, who each added less than one story element by the end of the year. A repeated measures ANOVA, with narrative structure scores as the outcome, showed only a significant main effect of Time, F(1, 40) = 9.024, p = .005, η_p² = .184, indicating that the increase in story structure scores from the beginning to the end of the year was statistically significant for both monolingual groups. That is, similar to their bilingual peers, a majority of children, but not all of them, added characters/settings (Spanish = 95%, English = 100%), actions/attempts (Spanish = 90%, English = 90%) and initiating events (Spanish = 90%, English = 95%) at the beginning of the year. By the end of the year, all children added characters/settings, initiating events and action/attempts, except for one child who did not add this latter element in English (95%). No other element was included by all of the children (Spanish range = 0% to 48%, English range = 0% to 57%).

Story length and word diversity

As Table 2 also shows, at the beginning of the year, the monolingual groups produced stories of comparable length (M overall = 6.02, SD = 2.92) and word diversity (M overall = 22.12, SD = 7.56). The results of separate repeated measures ANOVA with Clauses and NDW as the within-subject variables did not reveal any significant main effects or interactions (ps > .05), further indicating no change over time in terms of story length and word diversity. The lack of a significant difference between groups is in spite of the higher scores for the English monolingual group, than the functionally monolingual Spanish group, in terms of the number of clauses (~+2 clauses).

Errors and revisions

In addition, Table 2 shows that the two monolingual groups told stories that contained a comparable number of errors (M overall = 1.81, SD = 1.52) and total mazes (M overall = 5.48, SD = 4.57) at both time points. Yet, at both time points, the Spanish monolingual group, on average, included less than one lexical or grammatical revision per story, while the English monolingual group, on average, included more than one. In addition, children’s use of lexical and grammatical revisions was positively associated with their number of clauses (r _{beginning-of-year} = .339, p = .028; r _end-of-year = .329, p = .036). Given this association, we relied on the proportion score (number of revisions over the total number of clauses) when making comparisons between these groups’ revisions. After an arcsine-square root transformation, as is typical when conducting a repeated measures ANOVA with proportions, there were no statistically significant differences between the proportion of revisions for Spanish monolinguals (M _{beginning-of-year} = 0.13, SD = 0.16; M _end-of-year = 0.14, SD = 0.20) and English monolinguals (M _{beginning-of-year} = 0.22, SD = 0.18; M _end-of-year = 0.22, SD = 0.19) or change over time (ps > .05).

Discussion

With the aim of better understanding the unique attributes of LM learners’ narrative development, including their linguistic strengths and challenges, we compared the oral language skills of young Spanish-English bilinguals to their functionally monolingual Spanish-speaking and EO peers. Using a wordless cartoon to elicit oral retells in English and Spanish, we examined the groups’ discourse (story structure complexity), semantic (word diversity) and grammatical (errors, revisions) skills. We found evidence of comparable discourse and semantic skills as well as differences in grammatical skills between bilinguals and monolinguals. In particular, the study findings of relative differences between bilinguals and their functionally monolingual Spanish counterparts, versus their English monolingual counterparts, highlight potentially unique attributes to bilingual learning and point to their potential linguistic strengths.

In line with the developmental narrative literature, which has primarily focused on monolingual (English) development (Hudson & Shapiro, 1991; McCabe & Peterson, 1991), the bilingual LM learners in this study demonstrated gains in story structure complexity over one school year. Specifically, time comparisons revealed significant differences in bilingual children’s story structure complexity, in both English and Spanish, between the fall and the spring of the kindergarten year. While at the beginning of the year, a majority of children included mentions of characters/settings, initiating events and action/attempts in their stories, all children had included these elements in their stories by the end of the school year.

In addition, comparisons between bilinguals and monolinguals, showed no significant difference in story structure complexity, in either English or Spanish. The bilingual LM learners in this study also showed comparable narrative structure complexity scores across their two languages (Fiestas & Peña, 2004; Pearson, 2002). These findings serve to confirm our expectation at the outset of this study that young LM learners’ story structure complexity would be comparable to their monolingual peers’ and across their two languages provided they experience approximately equal exposure to and use of their two languages, as the bilingual participants in this study did. This study, which highlights storytelling as an area of strength for bilingual LM learners, goes beyond the previous literature that has emphasized LM learners’ “lower” oral language (e.g. Bialystok, Luk, Peets, & Yang, 2010) in comparison to their monolingual peers’.

While story structure complexity increased with time, children’s word diversity and their lexical and grammatical revisions and errors did not change significantly over one school year. Prior studies using similar language measures with LM learners also reveal no effect of time, or show increases with time, but often in only one language and not the other (Rojas & Iglesias, 2013; Uccelli & Páez, 2007). As Ucceli and Páez (2007) also argue, the difference in results could be attributed to the differences across studies, for example, in terms of the length of the interval between the initial and final testing sessions. In particular, using growth curve modeling, Rojas and Iglesias (2013) found significant increases in LM learners’ word diversity from the fall of kindergarten to the spring of second grade. Accordingly, the LM learners in our sample may have experienced significant increases in word diversity had we tracked their narrative development over longer periods.

Moreover, while the bilinguals in this study scored relatively lower than monolinguals on the standardized measure of vocabulary we used for sampling purposes, we found no evidence that bilingualism contributed to lower word diversity in Spanish or English narratives. The lack of difference between monolinguals and bilinguals on a measure of word diversity is in contrast to the long-held belief that vocabulary is an area of weakness for LM learners (Marchman et al., 2010; Place & Hoff, 2011). Specifically, a long line of research shows that bilinguals tend to score lower than their monolingual peers when comparisons are made on standardized measures of vocabulary (Bialystok, 2009; Bialystok et al., 2010; Pearson, Fernández, & Oller, 1993; Umbel & Oller, 1994).

The present study findings offer a more nuanced understanding of bilingual children’s vocabulary performance than has been suggested in prior studies, and point to the utility of using both standardized assessments and language sample analysis for unearthing linguistic strengths for bilingual LM learners as well as the LM learner group in general (Bedore et al., 2010; Gorman, Bingham, Fiestas, & Terry, 2016; Gutiérrez-Clellen, 1995; Justice, Bowles, Pence, & Gosse, 2010). In particular, the difference in vocabulary performance by LM learners in this study as a function of measure highlights the separate skill sets children draw on in completing standardized assessment versus narrative-elicitation tasks. That is, whereas the standardized vocabulary assessment used in this study reflects children’s knowledge of word labels, the measure of word diversity reflects children’s productivity with language, specifically, skill in using words. Previous study findings also show asymmetrical performance by bilinguals on standardized and narrative-elicited vocabulary, albeit only assessed in English (Peets & Bialystok, 2015). Thus, we extend this previous literature by including a measure of bilinguals’ Spanish skills, in addition to English skills, and providing evidence to support the view that narrative contexts may tap into an aspect of lexical development that is not measured by standardized assessments.

Our linguistically detailed analyses of children’s errors and revisions also revealed group differences as a function of bilingual status and, as such, contribute to the field’s understanding of the unique attributes of bilingual language learning. In particular, despite their similar rates of errors in Spanish, bilinguals engaged in higher rates of revisions in Spanish than did their functionally monolingual Spanish peers. Given that we also found a positive relation of revisions to word diversity, but to not errors, we argue that some types of mazes, in particular revisions, reflect advanced linguistic knowledge and not uncertainty. That is, further informing the debate as to whether maze use is a reflection of language uncertainty or advanced linguistic knowledge (Bedore et al., 2006), this pattern of results suggests that revisions to speech reflect an attempt at increasing the complexity of the language, which requires advanced linguistic knowledge (Gass & Selinker, 2008; Kormos, 1999). If, for example, after producing a greater number of revisions in Spanish, errors remained in the bilinguals’ Spanish narratives to a larger extent than would be expected of their functionally monolingual peers (i.e. baseline), this would have lent credence to the notion that bilinguals’ greater use of mazes reflects language uncertainty.

Our study results further showed that in English, the bilinguals committed more errors, primarily of inflections, than did their English counterparts. Yet, the bilinguals and English monolinguals engaged in a comparable number of revisions. We argue that bilinguals’ error rates may reflect their emerging bilingualism, which is in line with previous research that shows rapid language growth, especially in English for LM learners (see review in Hammer et al., 2014). In fact, the pattern of errors was comparable across the groups; inflectional affixes were the majority of bilingual and English monolingual children’s errors in English. Moreover, we take the finding of a lack of association between revisions and errors in English as further evidence against the notion that the use of mazes reflects language uncertainty. To be clear, if bilinguals’ use of mazes reflected their uncertainty with language, we should have seen them engage in more revisions in English than did English monolinguals, as this is the language in which they committed more errors.

Limitations and future directions

Despite this study’s attempt to comprehensively analyze the narrative production skills of Spanish-English bilingual children, its limitations deserve mention and should be addressed in subsequent research. The challenges in conducting this study included finding a sample of monolinguals who received no exposure to another language. This led to a recruitment strategy that included sampling children from two education program types. Thus, we made efforts to minimize other differences between the groups, for example, in terms of socioeconomic background, age and gender. It is worth noting that while we did not obtain individual-level income information, we recruited children from low-income and low-performing schools and as such, our sample represents the majority LM learner demographic in the US.

Also, while we ruled out differences in bilingual children’s language features as a function of their language of instruction, it is possible that the language of instruction impacted language use for the other groups. In particular, the Spanish monolinguals’ enrollment in TBE programs meant that they received some English exposure at school (10%–20% of instruction was supposed to be in English), which may have served to diminish differences between these children and the children we deemed bilingual (e.g. in terms of errors). With that said, it is important to keep in mind that the pattern of results for revisions and errors did not differ between the end and beginning of the year, when the TBE-instructed monolinguals had not at that point had much exposure to their TBE program. Nevertheless, future research should continue to attempt to disentangle the confounding variables of language of instruction and age when making comparisons between school-age monolinguals and bilinguals in each of their languages.

Another potential limitation of the present study was the unmatched vocabulary performance between the two monolingual groups at the beginning of the year, which suggests that the monolingual groups differed on variables other than language background. That is, despite a lack of difference between narrative structure and linguistic features, the monolingual Spanish speakers may have differed from their English monolingual counterparts on vocabulary skill. It is worth noting, however, that several scholars have raised concerns over the type of standardized measure used in this study to assess Spanish skills (see Oller, Jarmulowicz, Pearson, & Cobo-Lewis, 2010), citing a lack of cultural validity. Future studies that chart dual language development in bilinguals should be guided by the principle of identifying measures that are either normed on populations that more closely match the study participants (see a recent measure by Peña, Gutiérrez-Clellen, Iglesias, Goldstein, & Bedore, 2014) or that are more ecologically valid, such as the oral narrative. Indeed, in this study, the oral retell provided a comprehensive assessment of young children’s language skills, including areas of linguistic strengths (i.e. revisions in Spanish as evidence of advanced linguistic knowledge), not only weaknesses (e.g. English errors). These findings of relative differences in language skills between bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals, versus English monolinguals, speak to the complex interaction between a bilingual child’s two languages.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

Perla B Gámez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Loyola University Chicago, IL, USA; e-mail pgamez@luc.edu.

Dahlia González was an undergraduate student at Loyola University Chicago, IL, USA, when this study was conducted and is now a doctoral student in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA.

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