This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: An international research effort has examined how children develop the ability to express what story characters think, feel and perceive. Research groups from around the world collected 5,507 picture-based stories from 2,763 typically developing monolingual and bilingual children ages 3 to 13.
The children came from 32 countries and spoke 44 languages. All stories were elicited with the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN; Gagarina et al., 2019). MAIN was designed under the leadership of professor Natalia Gagarina, head of the Research Area Language Development & Multilingualism at the Leibniz Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin, to assess the narrative skills of children who are born or have grown up learning one or more languages.
The researchers transcribed the stories and coded them based on the multidimensional narrative organization scheme for internal state terms, meaning words that express characters' thoughts, emotions and perceptions. They then analyzed which factors influenced whether a child used such terms, including age, monolingualism or bilingualism, language of the story, retelling versus telling and story length. The paper is published in the journal Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools.
Older children were much more likely to describe characters' thoughts and feelings, and retelling a story boosted this considerably compared with telling it from pictures alone. Monolingual and bilingual children did not differ, and bilinguals performed similarly in both of their languages. Children mentioned internal states that start events, such as a character wanting something, far more often than states that appear as reactions.
Story length mattered only for younger children. "The study shows that children's ability to make characters' inner worlds explicit develops substantially during elementary school, across languages and for both monolingual and bilingual learners," summarize the authors. The strong effect of retelling suggests that this format is particularly suitable when researchers and clinicians want to assess how well a child can verbalize internal states with MAIN.
MAIN is a freely available task that speech-language pathologists and therapists working with bilingual children can easily add to their toolkit. The study confirms it is well suited to assessing how children express characters' internal states, which offer a window into both language and cognition. Earlier research has also used MAIN to distinguish children with typical development from those with developmental language disorder (DLD).
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