Acquisition of narrative macrostructure: A comprehensive overview of results from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives

Abstract

In this paper, we give a comprehensive overview of the results from studies that have used the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) to investigate comprehension and production of narrative macrostructure (story structure) to date. We show the wide range of research in which MAIN has been used through summaries of core results from studies that investigated age effects, and studies that compared monolinguals with bilinguals, bilinguals’ two languages, and typically-developing (TD) children with children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Results from studies including factors that influence bilinguals’ narrative skills (e.g., language skills, language input) are also covered, as are those that deal with methodological aspects and more specifically, task effects, i.e., how the choice of elicitation mode (telling; retelling; model story) and story (Cat/Dog; Baby Birds/Baby Goats) influence story structure and story comprehension. As concluding remarks, we summarize the state-of-the-art of narrative research using MAIN and outline possible directions for future studies.

Age and task type effects on comprehension and production of narrative macrostructure: storytelling and retelling by Swedish-speaking children aged 6 and 8

“…To enable comparison with previous research, the present study uses the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (hereafter MAIN; Gagarina et al, 2012Gagarina et al, , 2015Gagarina et al, , 2019b, a picturebased narrative instrument developed for children aged 4 to 10 with standardized elicitation procedures for both a story telling and a story retelling task, as well as scoring protocols for story comprehension and story structure (narrative macrostructure). MAIN is currently available in over 80 languages and has been used in a large number of studies covering a wide range of languages and language combinations (for a recent overview of studies using MAIN to investigate story comprehension and story structure, see Lindgren et al, 2023).…”