MAIN: multilingual assessment instrument for narratives

The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) was designed in order to assess narrative skills in children who acquire one or more languages from birth or from early age. MAIN is suitable for children from 3 to 10 years and evaluates both comprehension and production of narratives. Its design allows for the assessment of several languages in the same child, as well as for different elicitation modes: Model Story, Retelling, and Telling. MAIN contains four parallel stories, each with a carefully designed six-picture sequence. The stories are controlled for cognitive and linguistic complexity, parallelism in macrostructure and microstructure, as well as for cultural appropriateness and robustness. The instrument has been developed on the basis of extensive piloting with more than 550 monolingual and bilingual children aged 3 to 10, for 15 different languages and language combinations. Even though MAIN has not been norm-referenced yet, its standardized procedures can be used for evaluation, intervention and research purposes. MAIN is currently available in the following languages: English, Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bulgarian, Croatian, Cypriot Greek, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Icelandic, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Standard Arabic, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Welsh.

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New language versions of MAIN: Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives – Revised

ZAS Papers in Linguistics ◽

10.21248/zaspil.64.2020.543 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 64 ◽

pp. 274

Author(s):

Natalia Gagarina ◽

Josefin Lindgren

Keyword(s):

Language Impairment ◽

Theory Development ◽

Assessment Instrument ◽

Swedish Population ◽

Linguistic Complexity ◽

Cultural Appropriateness ◽

The Road ◽

Narrative Skills ◽

Linguistic Patterns ◽

The Cost

The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) is a theoretically grounded toolkit that employs parallelpictorial stimuli to explore and assess narrative skills in children in many different languages. It is part of the LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) battery of tests that were developed in connection with the COST Action IS0804 Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment(2009−2013). MAIN hasbeen designed to assess both narrative production and comprehensionin children who acquire one or more languages from birth or from early age. Its design allows for the comparable assessment of narrative skills in several languages in the same child and in different elicitation modes: Telling, Retelling and Model Story. MAIN contains four parallel stories, each with a carefully designed six-picture sequence based on a theoretical model of multidimensional story organization. The stories are controlled for cognitive and linguistic complexity, parallelism in macrostructure and microstructure, as well as for cultural appropriateness and robustness. As a tool MAIN had been used to compare children’s narrative skills across languages, and also to help differentiate between childrenwith and without developmental language disorders, both monolinguals and bilinguals. This volume consists of two parts. The main content of Part I consists of33 papers describing the process of adapting and translating MAIN to a large number of languagesfrom different parts of the world. Part II contains materials for use for about 80 languages, including pictorial stimuli, which are accessible after registration. MAIN was first published in 2012/2013 (ZASPiL56). Several years of theory development and material construction preceded this launch. In 2019 (ZASPiL 63), the revised English version (revised on the basis of over 2,500 transcribed MAIN narratives as well as ca 24,000 responses to MAIN comprehension questions, collected from around 700 monolingual and bilingual children in Germany, Russia and Sweden between 2013-2019) was published together with revised versions in German, Russian, Swedish, and Turkish for the bilingual Turkish-Swedish population in Sweden. The present 2020 (ZASPiL 64) volume contains new and revised language versions of MAIN.

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Adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) to Catalan

ZAS Papers in Linguistics ◽

10.21248/zaspil.64.2020.554 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 64 ◽

pp. 31-36

Author(s):

Alondra Camus ◽

Melina Aparici

Keyword(s):

Pilot Study ◽

Assessment Instrument ◽

Bilingual Children ◽

Narrative Skills ◽

Official Languages

The adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS- MAIN; Gagarina, et al., 2019) to Catalan contributes to advancing our knowledge of the development of children’s narrative skills in a diversity of languages using the same protocol, making it possible to evaluate narratives also in Catalan-speakers. The adaptation of MAIN will be very useful in Catalonia, because it is a region where two official languages (Catalan and Spanish) coexist, Catalan being the language of schooling, so that most of the population is bilingual. However, currently there is no instrument for assessing narrative skills that allows for parallel assessment of Catalan in bilingual children. For these reasons, this adaptation will be of great value to promote the study of narratives in the bilingual population considering Catalan within the possible language combinations. The present paper describes the process of adapting MAIN to Catalan and reports results from the first pilot study using the Catalan MAIN.

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Investigating Children’s Narrative Abilities in a Chinese and Multilingual Context: Cantonese, Mandarin, Kam and Urdu Adaptations of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN)

Frontiers in Psychology ◽

10.3389/fpsyg.2020.573780 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 11 ◽

Author(s):

Rachel T. Y. Kan ◽

Angel Chan ◽

Natalia Gagarina

Keyword(s):

Language Impairment ◽

Language Disorder ◽

Assessment Instrument ◽

Bilingual Children ◽

Story Grammar ◽

Minority Children ◽

New Methods ◽

Narrative Skills ◽

Ethnic Minority Children ◽

Main Language

This article introduces the LITMUS-MAIN (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings-MAIN) and motivates the adaptation of this instrument into Chinese languages and language pairs involving a Chinese language, namely Cantonese, Mandarin, Kam, Urdu. We propose that these new adapted protocols not only contribute to the theoretical discussion on story grammar and widen the evidential base of MAIN to include more languages in studying bilinguals, they also offer new methods of assessing language development in young children that have the potential to tease apart the effects of language impairment and bilingualism and improve the identification of Developmental Language Disorder. These new protocols are the first tools to be designed for the dual assessment of language skills in these particular languages, in particular narrative skills in bilingual children speaking these languages. By catering to under-researched languages and over-looked groups of bilingual children, these new tools could improve the clinical management for certain bilingual ethnic minority children such as Urdu-Cantonese and Kam-Mandarin bilinguals, as well as promote the study of these groups and their acquisition issues. Advances in understanding the theoretical and acquisition issues in childhood bilingualism can also be made possible using these new tools.

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Narratives of Russian–German preschool and primary school bilinguals: Rasskaz and Erzaehlung

Applied Psycholinguistics ◽

10.1017/s0142716415000430 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 37 (1) ◽

pp. 91-122 ◽

Cited By ~ 17

Author(s):

NATALIA GAGARINA

Keyword(s):

Early Literacy ◽

Internal State ◽

Age Groups ◽

First Grade ◽

Assessment Instrument ◽

Bilingual Children ◽

Fine Grained ◽

Narrative Skills ◽

German Speaking ◽

Three Components

ABSTRACTThe goal of this study was to trace the dual language development of the narrative macrostructure in three age groups of Russian–German bilingual children and to compare the performance of simultaneous and sequential bilinguals. Fine-grained analyses of macrostructure included three components: story structure, story complexity, and internal state terms. Oral narratives were elicited via the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives. Fifty-eight Russian–German speaking bilingual children from three age groups participated: preschoolers (mean age = 45 months) and elementary school pupils (mean age first grade = 84 months, mean age third grade = 111 months); and there were 34 simultaneous and 24 sequential bilinguals. The results showed significant improvement for all three components of macrostructure between the preschool and first-grade period. Additional significant development from first to third graders was found only for story complexity in Russian. This is explained by the Russian curriculum explicitly teaching narrative skills during early literacy training. In the two older groups, simultaneous bilinguals showed advantages over sequential bilinguals, for story complexity only. This finding suggests considering bilingual type when evaluating narrative skills of bilinguals. The results indicate cross-language association of only some components of narrative score across languages. The findings support the examination of various constituents of macrostructure when evaluating its development as well as the progression of narrative skills.

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Macrostructural Narrative Skills of Monolingual and Simultaneously Bilingual Preschoolers

Lernen und Lernstörungen ◽

10.1024/2235-0977/a000277 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 8 (4) ◽

pp. 233-245 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Carina Marie Wehmeier

Keyword(s):

Language Processing ◽

Language Skills ◽

Age Groups ◽

Receptive Language ◽

Assessment Instrument ◽

Bilingual Children ◽

Story Comprehension ◽

Story Structure ◽

Narrative Skills ◽

Picture Story

Abstract. This article compares the development of macrostructural narrative skills of monolingual and simultaneously bilingual preschoolers in telling a picture story. It also addresses the connections between macrostructural narrative skills, receptive and productive language skills (LiSe DaZ), and auditory perception and processing skills (HASE). The narrative skills were collected using the Baby Birds picture story of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) and analyzed regarding the macrostructural components of story structure, story complexity, and story comprehension. This contribution includes data from 229 monolingual and 76 simultaneously bilingual children. The comparison of the three age groups (4;6 – 4;11, 5;0 – 5;5, 5;6 – 5;11 years) indicates significant developmental increases in the performance of monolingual children regarding story structure, story complexity, and story comprehension, while no clear age trends are apparent for the simultaneously bilingual children. Correlations are found for the story structure and story comprehension of monolingual and simultaneously bilingual children with individual receptive language skills and language-processing skills.

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Macrostructure in the narratives of Indonesian-Dutch bilinguals

Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism ◽

10.1075/lab.20015.tri ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Elena Tribushinina ◽

Mila Irmawati ◽

Pim Mak

Keyword(s):

Internal State ◽

Assessment Instrument ◽

Input Current ◽

Home Language ◽

Story Structure ◽

Narrative Skills ◽

Language Exposure ◽

Cross Lingual ◽

Cross Language ◽

The Relationship

Abstract There is no agreement regarding the relationship between narrative abilities in the two languages of a bilingual child. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that such cross-language relationships depend on age and language exposure by studying the narrative skills of 32 Indonesian-Dutch bilinguals (mean age: 8;5, range: 5;0–11;9). The narratives were elicited by means of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) and analysed for story structure, episodic complexity and use of internal state terms (ISTs) in the home language (Indonesian) and majority language (Dutch). The results demonstrate that story structure scores in the home language (but not in the majority language) were positively related to age. Exposure measures (current Dutch/Indonesian input, current richness of Dutch/Indonesian input, and length of exposure to Dutch) did not predict the macrostructure scores. There was a significant positive cross-language relationship in story structure and episodic complexity, and this relationship became stronger as a function of length of exposure to Dutch. There was also a positive cross-lingual relation in IST use, but it became weaker with age. The results support the idea that narrative skills are transferable between languages and suggest that cross-language relationships may interact with age and exposure factors in differential ways.

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Narrative abilities in early successive bilingual Slovak–English children: A cross-language comparison

Applied Psycholinguistics ◽

10.1017/s0142716415000454 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 37 (1) ◽

pp. 145-164 ◽

Cited By ~ 17

Author(s):

SVETLANA KAPALKOVÁ ◽

KAMILA POLIŠENSKÁ ◽

LENKA MARKOVÁ ◽

JAMES FENTON

Keyword(s):

Narrative Research ◽

First Language ◽

Nonword Repetition ◽

Bilingual Children ◽

Skill Transfer ◽

Typically Developing ◽

Narrative Skills ◽

English Bilingual ◽

Narrative Performance ◽

Cross Language

ABSTRACTThis study investigates macrostructure skill transfer in successive bilingual children speaking Slovak and English, a new language combination for narrative research. We examined whether narrative performance reflected language dominance and assessed relationships between nonword repetition (NWR) and narrative skills within and across languages. Forty typically developing Slovak–English bilingual children (mean age = 5 years, 10 months) were evaluated for microstructure and macrostructure performance in both languages through story telling and retelling tasks. In addition, NWR was assessed in Slovak, the children's first language (L1). Macrostructure scores were higher in their L1 than in their second language (L2), but comprehension did not differ across languages. L1 NWR was significantly related to L1 microstructure scores, but not to L1/L2 macrostructure or L2 microstructure. Implications for assessing bilingual children's language are discussed.

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Cross-language synonyms in the lexicons of bilingual infants: one language or two?

Journal of Child Language ◽

10.1017/s030500090000982x ◽

1995 ◽

Vol 22 (2) ◽

pp. 345-368 ◽

Cited By ~ 132

Author(s):

Barbara Zurer Pearson ◽

Sylvia Fernández ◽

D. K. Oller

Keyword(s):

Parent Report ◽

Bilingual Children ◽

Early Age ◽

Stages Of Development ◽

Bilingual Child ◽

Empirical Claim ◽

Language System ◽

Strong Principle ◽

Cross Language ◽

Rule Out

ABSTRACTThis study tests the widely-cited claim from Volterra & Taeschner (1978), which is reinforced by Clark's Principle Of Contrast (1987), that young simultaneous bilingual children reject cross-language synonyms in their earliest lexicons. The rejection of translation equivalents is taken by Volterra & Taeschner as support for the idea that the bilingual child possesses a single-language system which includes elements from both languages. We examine first the accuracy of the empirical claim and then its adequacy as support for the argument that bilingual children do not have independent lexical systems in each language. The vocabularies of 27 developing bilinguals were recorded at varying intervals between ages 0;8 and 2;6, using the MacArthur GDI, a standardized parent report form in English and Spanish. The two single-language vocabularies of each bilingual child were compared to determine how many pairs of translation equivalents (TEs) were reported for each child at different stages of development. TEs were observed for all children but one, with an average of 30% of all words coded in the two languages, both at early stages (in vocabularies of 2–12 words) and later (up to 500 words). Thus, Volterra & Taeschner's empirical claim was not upheld. Further, the number of TEs in the bilinguals' two lexicons was shown to be similar to the number of lexical items which co-occurred in the monolingual lexicons of two different children, as observed in 34 random pairings for between-child comparisons. It remains to be shown, therefore, that the bilinguals' lexicons are not composed of two independent systems at a very early age. Furthermore, the results appear to rule out the operation of a strong principle of contrast across languages in early bilingualism.

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A new perspective on referentiality in elicited narratives: Introduction to the Special Issue

First Language ◽

10.1177/01427237211062300 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 014272372110623

Author(s):

Natalia Gagarina ◽

Ute Bohnacker

Keyword(s):

Language Disorders ◽

Comparative Investigation ◽

Assessment Instrument ◽

Special Issue ◽

Story Grammar ◽

Developmental Language Disorders ◽

Narrative Skills ◽

Referential Expressions ◽

New Perspective ◽

The Impact

This special issue investigates the use of referential expressions in elicited picture-based narratives by children with and without developmental language disorders, across a range of languages and language combinations. All contributions use the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN, Gagarina et al. 2012, 2019). The studies featured in this issue cover monolingual and bilingual children aged 4–11 years, but focus mainly on age 4–7, a period in a child’s life where great strides are made in the development of narrative skills. This collection of papers offers a new perspective on referentiality for several reasons: all studies use the same stimuli and by and large the same procedure for the elicitation of narratives. The stimuli, four picture-based stories, are controlled for comparability of protagonists, plot and story structure. They were designed as a ‘visual’ representation of a multidimensional model of story grammar. This methodological and theoretical base allows for a comparative investigation of referentiality (including reference introduction, maintenance and reintroduction) in narratives, across languages and populations. This introduction addresses theoretical aspects of referentiality in decontextualised discourse and reviews the literature regarding the impact of language-specific referential systems and the age and path of acquisition in typically developing children and children with developmental language disorders. We also discuss methodological aspects of eliciting referentiality in narratives in detail. This introduction thus seeks explanations for the diverse and sometimes contradictory empirical results regarding children’s mastery of referentiality. Finally, an overview of the contributions in the special issue is given.

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CODE SWITCHING AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF LINGUISTIC SYSTEM OF SIMULTANEOUS BILINGUAL CHILDREN

Englisia Journal ◽

10.22373/ej.v5i1.1311 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 5 (1) ◽

pp. 1

Author(s):

Leni Amelia Suek

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Development ◽

Language Use ◽

Code Switching ◽

Bilingual Children ◽

Early Age ◽

Language Competence ◽

Code Mixing ◽

Linguistic System ◽

Sociolinguistic Competence

Code switching and code mixing are the phenomena commonly seen done by a bilingual. This behavior is influenced by several aspects such as the linguistic system, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and language competence of the bilingual. If children are able to distinguish two different languages since early age, they will be considered simultaneous bilinguals. They show that they develop multiple, rather than single, linguistic systems. However, it was understood that code switching and code mixing were due to the failure in using proper words, language features, and sociolinguistic competence. Yet, recent studies have shown that bilingual children are able to use both languages proficiently with no signs of confusion or failure in language use. This ability also does not hinder their cognitive development.

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