Syntactic Complexity of L2 Story Production in Minority Children with Mild Intellectual Disability: Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis

Narrative analysis holds significant value in the assessment of bilingual populations, including both typically developing and clinical groups, such as national minorities who often speak the language of their country of residence as a second language. The present study aimed to compare the syntactic complexity of narratives in the Croatian language produced by Roma national minority children with mild intellectual disability (n = 16) and their typically developing Croatian chronological (n = 16) and language age (n = 16) peers. This study was conducted in accordance with the Ethical Code of the University of Zagreb. Narratives were elicited using the MAIN instrument. Roma children demonstrate diminished performance in the mean length of communication unit and the mean length of clause compared to both control groups, while they only perform below their chronological typically developing peers on the clausal density measure. The most prevalent syntactic error observed was the omission of sentence elements. Establishing connections among clauses in their second language appears to a lesser challenge than constructing complex sentences.