Narrative Skills of Monolingual and Bilingual Pre-School and Primary School Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD): A Systematic Review

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), previously known as Specific Language Impairment (SLI), is a common developmental disorder that affects both preschool and school aged children. The language characteristics of children with DLD vary considerably with the main challenge being the learning of language structures and morphosyntactic and lexical limitations (Leonard, 2014). Research has shown that when it comes to bilinguals with language deficits caution should be taken, since they may arise from impairment due to DLD but can also be caused by insufficient exposure to and limited knowledge of the target language (Reilly, Losh, Bellugi, & Wulfeck, 2004). A method that has often been used to investigate the language features of monolingual and monolingual children with DLD is to examine their narrative abilities, since narratives provide a quasi-naturalistic measure of children’s spontaneous language and reflect distinctive structural linguistic changes through childhood and adolescence. The objective of this paper is to conduct a systematic review of recent studies on the narrative skills of monolingual and bilingual pre-school and primary school children with DLD. Therefore, it focuses on 13 research articles published since 2010 until present that met the inclusion criteria set in this review. The selected studies fell under three main areas: 1) studies assessing the narrative skills of monolingual children with DLD/SLI, 2) studies comparing bilingual children of typical development and bilinguals with DLD/SLI and 3) studies comparing monolingual and bilingual children with DLD/SLI. The majority of studies reported significant differences in the narrative performance between monolinguals with and without DLD and between bilinguals with and without DLD. No significant difference is observed in the performance between monolinguals and bilinguals of typical language development, yet performance differences are noted between monolinguals with DLD and bilinguals with the same language impairment. Microstructure seems to be greatly affected by DLD with macrostructure being affected the less.