scholarly journals 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)

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.

scholarly journals The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN): Adding Kam to MAIN

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 147-151
Author(s):  
Wenchun Yang ◽  
Angel Chan ◽  
Natalia Gagarina
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Minority ◽  
Southern China ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Assessment Instrument ◽  
Narrative Development ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Minority Children ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Ethnic Minority Children ◽  
Minority People

This paper introduces the Kam version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). Kam is a minority language in southern China which belongs to the Kam-Tai language family and is spoken by the Kam ethnic minority people. Adding Kam to MAIN not only enriches the typological diversity of MAIN but also allows researchers to study children’s narrative development in a sociocultural context vastly distinctly different from the frequently examined WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. Moreover, many Kam- speaking children are bilingual ethnic minority children who are “left-behind” children living in Mainland China, growing up in a unique socio-communicative environment.

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

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.

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

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.

scholarly journals MAIN: multilingual assessment instrument for narratives

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalʹja Vladimirovna Gagarina ◽  
Daleen Klop ◽  
Sari Kunnari ◽  
Koula Tantele ◽  
Taina Välimaa ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Assessment Instrument ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Early Age ◽  
Linguistic Complexity ◽  
Cultural Appropriateness ◽  
Story Retelling ◽  
Standard Arabic ◽  
Narrative Skills

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.  

Using Informal Measures to Separate Language Impairment From Language Influence When Working With Diverse Students

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
pp. 1121-1127
Author(s):  
Scott Prath
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
Information Needs ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Language Difference ◽  
School Based ◽  
Diverse Backgrounds ◽  
Language Influence

Purpose Determining whether language errors result from native language influence or speech-language impairment can be challenging for professionals diagnosing and treating children from diverse backgrounds. Although we are fortunate to have some formal measures for Spanish-speaking children, children who speak any other language need to be evaluated informally. Taking language and culture into account, this article provides school-based professionals with a framework to separate language difference from disorder to improve diagnostic decisions and reduce caseloads by identifying students who may not need services. Conclusion Both linguistic and cultural knowledge are critical when working with families and children from different language backgrounds. To successfully diagnose and treat bilingual children, linguistic information needs to be further analyzed for differences of morphology, semantics, and syntax. An informal framework can successfully be applied during the evaluation and goal writing process so that professions can correctly differentiate between normal errors caused by second-language influence and errors that are indicative of a language disorder.

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

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.

scholarly journals The Croatian adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives*

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 37-44
Author(s):  
Gordana Hržica ◽  
Jelena Kuvač Kraljević
Keyword(s):  
Assessment Tool ◽  
Language Disorder ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Language Disorders ◽  
Assessment Instrument ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Narrative Skills ◽  
Bilingual Speakers ◽  
Age Range

This paper presents the Croatian version of the Multilingual Assessment tool for Narratives (MAIN), outlines its development and describes the research that has used it to assess narrative skills in monolingual and bilingual speakers. The Croatian version of MAIN has so far been used in three research projects and results have been presented in five peer-reviewed articles (published or in press) covering a total of 175 children in the age range from 5;0 to 9;0 (20 with developmental language disorder) and 60 adults, age range from 22 to 76. The accumulated results indicate that MAIN can differentiate narrative skills of speakers in distinct age groups and can distinguish children with language disorders form children with typical language development.

scholarly journals The Receptive–Expressive Gap in English Narratives of Spanish–English Bilingual Children With and Without Language Impairment

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (6) ◽  
pp. 1381-1392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd A. Gibson ◽  
Elizabeth D. Peña ◽  
Lisa M. Bedore
Keyword(s):  
Language Impairment ◽  
First Grade ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Typical Development ◽  
Narrative Generation ◽  
Narrative Skills ◽  
English Bilingual ◽  
Expressive Performance ◽  
Contextual Support ◽  
Primary Language Impairment

Purpose First, we sought to extend our knowledge of second language (L2) receptive compared to expressive narrative skills in bilingual children with and without primary language impairment (PLI). Second, we sought to explore whether narrative receptive and expressive performance in bilingual children's L2 differed based on the type of contextual support. Method In a longitudinal group study, 20 Spanish–English bilingual children with PLI were matched by sex, age, nonverbal IQ score, and language exposure to 20 bilingual peers with typical development and administered the Test of Narrative Language (Gillam & Pearson, 2004) in English (their L2) at kindergarten and first grade. Results Standard scores were significantly lower for bilingual children with PLI than those without PLI. An L2 receptive–expressive gap existed for bilingual children with PLI at kindergarten but dissipated by first grade. Using single pictures during narrative generation compared to multiple pictures during narrative generation or no pictures during narrative retell appeared to minimize the presence of a receptive–expressive gap. Conclusions In early stages of L2 learning, bilingual children with PLI have an L2 receptive–expressive gap, but their typical development peers do not. Using a single picture during narrative generation might be advantageous for this population because it minimizes a receptive–expressive gap.

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

2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-122 ◽  
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.

scholarly journals The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives: Greek

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 101-106
Author(s):  
Ianthi Maria Tsimpli ◽  
Maria Andreou ◽  
Eleni Peristeri
Keyword(s):  
Language Disorder ◽  
Assessment Instrument ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Developmental Language Disorder ◽  
Greek Language

This paper presents an overview of the adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives in Greek, focusing on its use in Greek academic and diagnostic settings. A summary of the properties of the Greek language and the concomitant challenges these language-specific properties posed to MAIN adaptation are presented along with a summary of published studies with monolingual Greek-speaking children and bilingual children with Greek as L2, with and without Developmental Language Disorder.

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