Cross-Linguistic Lexical, Grammatical, and Discourse Performance on Oral Narrative Retells Among Young Spanish Speakers.

This study investigated relations among microlevel and macrolevel domains of oral narrative retells within and across the languages of Spanish-speaking bilingual children. Fifty-six first and second graders (Mage = 7 years, 3 months) were assessed on a retell task in Spanish and English. Two statistical analyses were conducted: (a) correlations within and across microlevel lexical (number of different words) and grammatical (mean length of utterance-word and subordination index) domains and (b) hierarchical regression to determine the influence of microlevel domains on a macrolevel discourse score. Results highlighted a number of significant within- and cross-language correlations, and identified vocabulary as a significant predictor of macrolevel discourse scores within both languages, while grammar was a predictor within English only.