Analysis of the narrative skills at the macrostructural level of turkish-german bilingual children with typical and atypical language development between 36-79 months

The present study was conducted to longitudinally examine the narrative skills of Turkish-German bilingual children with typical development (TD), atypical language development risk (AD_R) and atypical language development diagnosed with a language disorder (AD_LD) between 36-79 months using MAIN (Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives) within the macrostructure framework. For this purpose, a total of 61 bilingual children with TD (n= 34), AD_R (n= 15) and AD_LD (n= 12) were included in the study. The children first answered the comprehension questions of the model story task in both languages and then told their own stories using the picture series presented to them in the telling task and answered the comprehension questions related to the stories they told. The data were evaluated within the framework of macrostructure components. In the analysis of the data, inter-group and intra-group comparisons between languages were analyzed using two-way ANOVA using the R program. The effect of age variable on macrostructures was analyzed by correlation analysis. All analyses revealed a positive relationship between age and macrostructures scores. Between-group analyses revealed that the macrostructure scores of TD children were higher than the scores of AD_R and AD_LD children. The comparison between children's two languages also showed that macrostructure scores in their dominant and second language, German, were higher than Turkish scores. Finally, the effect of narrative task type on comprehension scores was investigated and the comprehension scores after the model story were found to be higher than comprehension scores after the narrative task. In the light of all these findings, it was concluded that this study could be an important starting point for being the reference norm data on the narrative skills of Turkish-matched TD and AD bilingual children.