Telling Tales: Personal Event Narratives and Life Stories

Abstract

To promote development of personal event narratives and life stories, speech-language pathologists can help clients retrieve information about interesting events, provide experiences worthy of narrating, and draw upon published narratives to serve as model texts. Clinicians can also address four interrelated processes in intervention: reminiscing, reflecting, making coherent connections, and signaling the plot structure. Furthermore, they can activate metacognitive awareness of how evaluations of experiences, coherence, and plot structure are signaled in well-formed personal event narratives and life stories.

Evaluating Personal Stroke Narratives from Bilingual Greek-English Immigrants with Aphasia

“…On the other hand, when the narrator expresses their thoughts, emotions and evaluations about what happened [4], this refers to the evaluative function of the narrative [16]. At a philosophical level, being the narrator of a personal event presupposes the awareness of oneself as the experiencer of the event in the past and the rememberer of the event in the present [2, p. 262].…”

“…Even though personal event narratives have received less attention in aphasia research than other forms of narrative discourse, they are critical to human interactions embodied by communication exchanges [2]. There is no doubt that the telling of personal stories is of paramount significance for establishing relations.…”

“…Despite a burgeoning literature exploring the discourse abilities of PWA, only a small body of research has focused on competence in producing personal event narratives [2]. Personal (event) narratives are stories a person constructs from memory about an experienced event.…”

“…Measuring narrative abilities offers information regarding language function at both the level of discourse (macrostructure) and the sentence and word levels (microstructure). Both macrostructure and microstructure levels are important for evaluating narrative competence across the lifespan [2]. The abilities of a speaker to narrate a “tellable” story is also influenced by life experiences, world knowledge and cultural heritage [3, 4].…”

“…In fact, one would struggle to recall a typical day in which a personal story relaying an event is not shared [14], whether short (e.g., a few sentences about what happened at the market) or long (e.g., a significant life-turning event such as the birth of a baby). It is assumed by the speaker that the hearer does not know the event(s), and subsequently actions are described causally or are rationally connected [2, 4]. For the listener, a coherent narrative must include details referring to the who , what , when , and where details of the event [16].…”