As a preface to future studies on language impairment in bilingual children, an exploratory analysis of lexical diversity and depth in the production of mental state verbs was conducted on the oral narratives of 9- and 11-year-old children who differed by language status. English-only (EO), bilingual (Spanish-English), and Spanish-only (SO) preadolescents produced oral narratives based on a wordless video. Prior to narrative elicitation, participants completed a priming task on mental state verbs and were instructed to focus on what the characters were thinking, saying, and feeling as they engaged in their narrative formulation. Colored still frames from the video were also available to reduce the memory load on recall. The resulting narratives were analyzed for mental state verb use by category (motivational, experiential, and belief) and the influence of the language of production. Lexical diversity was determined by number of different words (normalized to type-token ratio, TTR), and lexical depth was analyzed through a descriptive analysis of variations in the meaning of the belief verb "think" with respect to the expression of certainty/uncertainty. Results indicated that the EO children used the greatest proportion of experiential and belief mental states, while motivational verb use did not differentiate the language groups. In contrast, the SO group had the greatest TTR. The descriptive analysis of the belief verb "think" revealed greater lexical depth in the EO participants. Findings are discussed in terms of cross-language similarities and differences and their applications to the mental state framework for differentiating among bilingual children who may be at enhanced academic risk because of undetected language impairment.