What Do Children in India Talk About? Personal Narratives of Typically Developing Hindi-Speaking Children.

BACKGROUND: The recent development of the Global TALES Protocol provides a unique opportunity to conduct systematic cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparisons of children's personal narratives. This protocol contains 6 scripted prompts to elicit personal narratives in school-age children about times when they experienced feeling happy/excited, worried, annoyed, proud, being in a problem situation, something important. OBJECTIVES: The objectives of this study were to examine the topics of the children's narratives when they responded to the 6 prompts and draw comparisons with the topics of narratives spoken by children from 10 other countries speaking 8 other languages as described in the original feasibility paper. METHODS: We translated the Global TALES Protocol into Hindi and collected personal narratives of thirty Hindi-speaking children (aged 6-9 years), residing in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India. All personal narrative samples were elicited in person and audio recorded for manual coding of the topics. RESULTS: Although we observed many similarities in the topics of children's personal narratives between this dataset and the dataset reported on in the initial feasibility study, we also documented some novel topics, such as "welcoming guests" in response to the "excited" prompt; "financial problems" in response to the "worried" prompt; "helping someone by actions or by advising someone morally" in response to the "problem" prompt; and "mishap/personal loss" and "exams" in response to the "important" prompt. CONCLUSION: Some of these novel topics likely reflected the Indian culture. Because our study involved a group of children who are linguistically and culturally different from previous studies using the Global TALES protocol and, at ages 6-9 years, slightly younger than the 10-year-olds in prior studies, this study adds to the evidence that the Global TALES protocol can be used to elicit personal narratives of children from diverse languages and cultures, as young as age 6.

Personal Narratives of School-Age Children: A Cross-Sectional Developmental Study.

INTRODUCTION: Personal narratives are monological stories based on a personal experience that help children explain and understand their emotional states, as well as process positive and negative experiences. The aim of this study was to identify age- and emotion-related traits of lexical and grammatical abilities and coherence of personal stories produced by school-aged children between 7 and 13 years. METHODS: A total of 60 typically developing children, speakers of Croatian, were stratified into three groups according to age. Using the Global TALES protocol, each child was asked to produce six personal stories prompted by different emotional states. The personal narratives were analysed using measures of lexical diversity (lemma-token ratio and number of different words), productivity (total number of words), and syntactic complexity (mean length of utterances and clausal density). Based on the Narrative Coherence Coding Scheme, three coherence dimensions (context, chronology, and theme) were rated. RESULTS: Age group was shown to explain 18% of the variance in the ability to produce personal narratives. Personal narratives elicited through positive prompts were overall more lexically diverse but were significantly less elaborated chronologically and thematically than negative and neutral narratives. CONCLUSION: This study showed that coherence of the produced stories was connected with the child's lexicon and that both variables - lexicon and coherence - were influenced by emotional valence of the story. In contrast, grammatical aspects of the narrative were influenced only by age. Finally, it is possible to state that the Global TALES protocol is sensitive enough to capture specificities of creating personal stories, both developmental ones and those created under the influence of the emotional valence of the prompts.

Vocabulary Diversity in Personal Narratives Produced in Response to the Global TALES Protocol in Dutch-Speaking Students with and without Dyslexia.

INTRODUCTION: This study examines whether there are differences in expressive vocabulary between participants with and without dyslexia in personal narratives in response to the Global TALES protocol. METHODS: 22 monolingual Dutch-speaking participants aged 11-16 with dyslexia and 22 age and gender-matched peers without dyslexia were assessed on measures of decoding, reading comprehension, and spelling of words, pseudowords, verbs, and sentences. The participants also produced personal narratives in response to the six prompts contained in the Global TALES protocol. We analyzed the personal narratives for expressive vocabulary and counted the total number of different words (TNDW). RESULTS: The study revealed a significant relationship between TNDW and reading comprehension (r = 0.45, p = 0.002, BF10 = 17.70), spelling words (r = 0.42, p = 0.005, BF10 = 8.93), and spelling and writing conventions in sentences (r = 0.37, p = 0.016, BF10 = 3.11). The Global TALES protocol was successful in eliciting personal narratives in the Dutch-speaking participants with and without dyslexia. Participants with dyslexia used fewer different words (M = 192.27, SD = 64.37; 95% CI: [151.84-232.71]) compared to peers without dyslexia (M = 265.50, SD = 116.28; 95% CI: [225.06-305.93]; F(1, 42) = 6.68; p = 0.013; η2 = 0.14). When we compared the probability of models, Bayesian factors revealed moderate evidence for group differences in TNDW (BF = 3.94). CONCLUSION: Our findings indicate that older school-age participants with dyslexia may lag behind their peers in expressive vocabulary in a personal narrative discourse task that is relevant to everyday functioning. The results of this study highlight the relationship between expressive vocabulary and reading comprehension and the importance of the assessment of spoken language skills in children with dyslexia. Reading problems might lead to less advanced spoken language, which in turn may negatively affect the expressive vocabulary growth in individuals with dyslexia.