Narrative Skills in Korean-English Bilingual Children: Focusing on Task Type and Language

This study investigated the macrostructural and microstructural narrative skills of Korean-English bilingual children aged 6 to 9, focusing on the effects of language and task type. Narrative generation and retelling tasks were conducted in both Korean and English to examine differences in story grammar scores, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity. Additionally, the relationship between narrative skills and linguistic environment was explored. The findings revealed that story grammar performance was significantly higher in English than in Korean, supporting previous studies that reported language-dependent differences in macrostructure. In terms of microstructure, the number of different words (NDW) did not show significant differences between Korean and English but increased significantly in recall tasks, particularly in Korean. Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) was higher in Korean narratives due to the language’s complex grammatical morphology; however, MLU did not differ significantly across tasks. Correlation analysis showed that greater exposure to English was positively associated with English MLU but negatively correlated with Korean vocabulary. These findings highlight the importance of considering linguistic characteristics, task types, and environmental factors when evaluating and supporting the narrative abilities of Korean-English bilingual children.