Abstract
The story-retelling abilities of 25 English-dominant bilingual children with non-syndromic cleft lip and/or palate (CLP) were compared with those of typically developing (TD) children matched for age (4;7–8;5 years;months), language background, and socioeconomic status. Performance on narrative comprehension, English receptive vocabulary, verbal short-term memory, verbal working memory, and non-verbal intelligence was also measured in order to identify any underlying group differences in processing. Results revealed significantly poorer performance of the CLP group on narrative comprehension of inferential-type questions, receptive vocabulary, and verbal short-term memory. Importantly, the correlational analyses of story-retelling with other cognitive-linguistic measures supported the view that there are notable differences in the underlying processing of children with CLP and TD children. The implications for intervention programes and future research are discussed.