Understanding how young children develop language is essential to promoting strong language growth. Unfortunately, current research indicates that young children's language development differs by sex (Bouchard et al., 2009; Eriksson et al., 2012). These findings, however, are based on work examining language in isolation, which may not reflect children's full capacity for language. Examining language within a more naturalistic context, such as occurs with a narrative assessment, may identify a different trajectory for girls and boys. To understand the sex differences in language development identified by previous research (Bouchard et al., 2009; Eriksson et al., 2012), the present study utilized a contextualized assessment, the Narrative Assessment Protocol (Bowles et al., 2020), to examine children's content, form, and use of language across time. This study identified how preschoolers produce narratives and examined whether or not narrative skills develop differentially for girls vs. boys across time. Results indicated that for microstructural narrative skills, girls have higher skills than boys early on and this female advantage persists across time. However, for macrostructural skills, it was discovered that while boys begin preschool with lower skills than girls, the difference narrows within a year's time.
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