Clinical impact of wordless picture storybooks on bilingual narrative language production: A comparison of the ‘Frog’ stories

BACKGROUND: Language sampling, recognized as a gold standard for expressive language assessment, is often elicited using wordless picture storybooks. A series of wordless storybooks, commonly referred to as 'Frog' stories, have been frequently used in language-based research with children from around the globe. AIMS: To examine the impact that differences in stories have on narrative output by comparing narrative productions across a series of five storybooks produced by 831 bilingual (Spanish-English) children in kindergarten through third grade. METHODS & PROCEDURES: Each participant produced oral narratives using one of the five Frog storybooks in both English and Spanish. The narratives were recorded, transcribed and coded for a variety of measures of language production. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Negligible differences were observed in language measures when comparing groups of children who told different stories, with the exception of lexical diversity. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: The implications of using different storybooks to elicit narrative language samples from children are discussed from the perspectives of research and clinical practice.