Exploring Personal Narrative Coherence in 10-Year-Old Children: A Global Study Using the Global TALES Protocol
Marleen F. Westerveld, Stephanie Malone, Carol Westby, Cibelle Amato, Josephine Ohenewa Bampoe, Angel Chan, Kai-Mei Chen, Maria Chrysostomou, Mary Claessen, Jóhanna Einarsdóttir, Sara Ferman, Fernanda Dreux Fernandes, Pamela Filiatrault-Veilleux, Mateja Gabaj, Eleftheria Geronikou, Vani Gupta, Kristine Jensen de López, Khaloob Kawar, Jelena Kuvač Kraljević, HaeJi Lee, Jisun Lee, Rena Lyons, İlknur Maviş, Nadia Nørgaard, Mary-Pat O'Malley Keighran, Laura Quintanilla, Semra Selvi Balo, Elena Theodorou, Tze Peng Wong, Anita Mei-Yin Wong, Esra Yasar Gunduz, Wanlin Zhu, Nickola NelsonPurpose:
The overall aim of this exploratory study was to evaluate personal narrative coherence in groups of children representing a range of cultural and/or linguistic backgrounds. Based on previous research, we expected to find effects based on culture/language participant group and the emotional valence of the prompt (positive, negative, neutral). We also anticipated potential interactions between culture/language participant group and prompt type.
Method:
Four hundred seventeen 10-year-old children from 21 culture/language participant groups took part in this cross-sectional study. The children were from 19 countries or regions, speaking 18 different languages or dialects. All children were seen individually, either face-to-face or online, and asked to produce personal narratives in response to the Global Talking About Lived Experiences in Stories (TALES) protocol. Three of their narratives, each representing a different emotional valence—happy, angry, and a problem situation—were included in the current study. All narratives were coded for coherence using the multidimensional Narrative Coherence Coding Scheme (NaCCS), which yields a total coherence score and three coherence dimension subscores: context, chronology, and theme. Linear mixed models were used to identify differences in narrative coherence between culture/language participant groups and narrative prompt types.
Results:
We found significant main effects for both participant group and narrative prompt type on total coherence scores, as well as a significant interaction effect. Overall, the problem prompt elicited more coherent narratives than the angry prompt. Performance varied notably across culture/language participant groups, with no consistent pattern of strength linked to prompt type. Additionally, some culture/language participant groups scored significantly lower on total coherence than others. Significant participant group effects were also observed across all three coherence dimension subscores, with the theme dimension showing the greatest number of between-groups differences.
Conclusions:
In an increasingly multicultural and plurilingual world, the need for ecologically valid tools to assess children's spoken language skills is more critical than ever. Findings from this exploratory study offer further support for the use of the Global TALES protocol for eliciting personal narratives in children from diverse cultural and/or linguistic backgrounds. Furthermore, results indicated that the NaCCS is a viable method for describing differences and similarities in personal narrative coherence among these diverse groups of children. Our next steps involve refining the coding framework and expanding our participant pool to include larger, more age- and ability-representative samples—with the ultimate aim of integrating personal narrative assessment and analysis into routine clinical practice worldwide.
Supplemental Material: