Browsing by Subject "kertomus"

Aims This descriptive review presents the current knowledge of bilingual language impaired children’s narrative skills and evaluates potential clinical applications of narrative assessment in this context. There is a growing body of research about the effects of language impairment on the narrative skills and narrative tasks are used to variable degree in the assessment of language impairment. However, the specific effects in bilingual context have only been studied very recently. The answers to research questions 1. and 2. are based on critical examination of the articles and the answer to the third question is deduced from the answers to the former two. 1. What are the effects of bilingualism on the narratives of language impaired children? 2. How does language impairment manifest in the narratives of bilingual children? 3. Is the assessment of narrative skills applicable to diagnosing language impairment in bilingual children? Methods My material consisted of seven research articles derived from the databases EBSCO academic search complete, ProQuest medline and Pubmed in december 2016 with the search query (”language impairment” OR SLI) AND child* AND bilingual* AND (narrative* OR story*). The studies were control trials focusing on narrative microstructure and macrostructure. I compared the methods and results of the studies, evaluated possible causes for different outcomes, and made conclusions about the applicability of the results. Results and conclusions 1. Bilingualism had no effect on macrostructure, but impaired microstructure to some degree. 2. Language impairment had a detrimental effect on both microstructure and macrostructure, impairing particularly the use of mental state terms. 3. Macrostructure and especially the use of mental terms are promising methods in the assessment of language impairment in bilingual children.