Narrative or Conversation: Which Language Sample Type Is Optimal for Bilingual Children?

Purpose: This study examined the differences between two language sample types, conversation and narrative, to determine whether there is an optimal type for assessing bilingual school-age children's syntactic complexity and lexical diversity with language sample analysis (LSA). Method: Conversation and narrative language samples were elicited from 24 typically developing school-age children divided into three groups: bilingual Spanish–English, bilingual Mam–English (Mam is an indigenous Mayan language), and monolingual English. Two measures of syntactic complexity (mean length of utterance in morphemes MLUm and clausal density CD) and two measures of lexical diversity (number of different words NDW and moving-average type–token ratio MATTR) were calculated to compare different language sample types. Results: All four LSA measures differed significantly between the two language sample types. The measures of syntactic complexity (MLUm and CD) were significantly greater in narratives compared to conversational samples, whereas the measures of lexical diversity (NDW and MATTR) were significantly greater in conversational samples compared to narratives. Group differences were found in both language sample types. Conclusions: The optimal language sample context for bilingual school-age children may best be determined by the suspected area of difficulty for each child. However, a clinician may choose to include both language sample types in their evaluation for a wide variety of evidence. Future research should examine other language sample types, such as play-based and expository samples.