Bilingual and monolingual children might have different styles of using multimodal language. This study investigates speech disfluency and gesture production of 5- and 7-year-old Turkish monolingual (N = 61) and Turkish–English bilingual children (N = 51). We examined monolinguals’ Turkish narratives and bilinguals’ Turkish and English narratives. Results indicated that bilinguals were more disfluent than monolinguals, particularly for silent and filled (e.g., umm) pauses. Bilinguals used silent pauses and repetitions (e.g., cat cat) more frequently in English than in Turkish. Gesture use was comparable across language and age groups, except for iconic gestures. Monolinguals produced more iconic gestures than bilinguals. Children's overall gesture frequency predicted disfluency rates only in Turkish. Different gesture types might be orchestrated in the multimodal system, contributing to narrative fluency. The use of disfluency and gesture types might provide insight into bilingual and monolingual children's language development and communication strategies.

双语和单语儿童可能有不同的多模态语言使用风格。本研究调查了 5 岁和 7 岁土耳其语单语儿童 (N = 61) 和土耳其语-英语双语儿童 (N = 51) 的言语不流利和手势产生。我们研究了单语者的土耳其语叙述以及双语者的土耳其语和英语叙述。结果表明，双语者比单语者更不流利，特别是在无声和填充（例如，嗯）停顿时。双语者在英语中比在土耳其语中更频繁地使用无声停顿和重复（例如，猫猫）。除标志性手势外，不同语言和年龄组的手势使用具有可比性。单语者比双语者做出更多标志性手势。儿童的总体手势频率仅预测土耳其语的不流利率。不同的手势类型可能会在多模式系统中进行编排，从而有助于叙事的流畅性。不流利和手势类型的使用可能有助于深入了解双语和单语儿童的语言发展和沟通策略。