Disfluencies in the narratives of Russian-Hebrew bilingual children with and without Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)

The present study examined disfluencies in the narratives of Russian-Hebrew bilingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and Typical Language Development (TLD) in both Russian (home language) and Hebrew (societal language), with a focus on the independent and combined effects of language disorder and cross-linguistic differences on the rates and loci of disfluencies. Narratives were collected from 44 bilingual children (14 with DLD), ages 5;7-6;6, using a story retelling procedure. The narrative coding system targeted ratios of the following disfluencies (per C-unit): silent pauses, repetitions, self-corrections, and filled pauses. Silent pauses longer than 0.25 sec were identified using PRAAT software© and were classified according to the following durations: more than 0.5 sec, 1 sec, 1.5 sec, and 2 sec. In addition, the loci of pauses (utterance-initial or utterance-internal) and repetitions (content or function words) were coded. Overall, children with DLD and TLD had comparable rates of disfluencies but differed for pauses longer than 0.5 sec and repetition of content words in both languages. For the overall ratio of pauses (more than 0.25 sec), children with and without DLD had more pauses in Russian. Long pauses and repetition of content words reflect difficulties for bilingual children with DLD in dealing with the demands of storytelling, in particular planning processes. A higher ratio of pauses in Russian suggests that they reflect lower proficiency in that language.