The linguistic expression of causal relations in picture-based narratives: A comparative study of bilingual and monolingual children with TLD and DLD

The present study examines the linguistic expression of causal relations between the motion events within the main episode in a picture-based narrative. One hundred and fifty children aged 5–7 were asked to narrate a story based on a series of pictures: 45 Hebrew monolinguals (19 with Developmental Language Disorders [DLD]), 57 English–Hebrew bilinguals (20 with DLD) and 48 Russian–Hebrew bilinguals (21 with DLD). The narratives told by bilingual children with Typical Language Development (TLD) were as complex as those of their monolingual peers in occurrence of causal relations to establish a goal-oriented episode, and in the use of language forms as cohesive devices. By contrast, bilingual and monolingual children with DLD showed lower performance on expression of causal relations, particularly those involving more complex scenes that demand higher levels of linguistic complexity and content elaboration. The form–function analyses enabled an exploration of cognitive and language abilities in interaction in the context of narrative discourse production. The study reinforced the differences between children with TLD and children with DLD, showing that typical language development rather than the proficiency in a particular language is necessary for generating causal relations and the particular linguistic forms that together yield a coherent narrative.