E-Posters
E-Posters
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E-Posters will be uploaded for viewing in September and displayed in-person at the Global TALES Network Symposium.
The Influence of Family Reading Practices on Narrative Skills in Arabic-Speaking Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
Taghreed Alhazmi
Taibah University
Contact: taghreed.slp@gmail.com
Introduction: Narrative skills are foundational to language acquisition and social communication, yet children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often exhibit difficulties in narrative coherence, organization, and expressive language. While family reading practices support language development, their impact on narrative abilities among Arabic-speaking children with ASD remains under-investigated.
Objectives: This study aimed to examine the influence of family reading frequency and duration on the narrative abilities of Arabic-speaking children with ASD.
Methods: A mixed-method approach was used. I used parental questionnaires (n = 60) to collect quantitative data on home reading practices. Narrative performance was assessed in a subsample of children (n = 6) using the Narrative Scoring Scheme (NSS; Heilmann et al., 2010), which was adapted for Arabic. In this assessment, three children provided personal narratives during natural conversations with their mothers, while the other three narrated a familiar short story. The analysis was conducted both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Results: The results revealed a positive correlation between the frequency and duration of shared reading and the narrative performance of the children. Children whose families engaged in daily reading sessions or participated in extended reading activities exhibited superior scores in aspects of narrative macrostructure. Conversely, the severity of autism did not demonstrate a significant correlation with reading preferences or narrative outcomes. These results enhance the application of sociocultural theory in comprehending narrative development in ASD and emphasize the critical role of family-centered literacy interventions. In addition, five major themes emerged from the NSS analysis: poor narrative setting, event-focused stories lacking goals, minimal emotional expression, weak temporal cohesion, and absence of causal links.
Conclusions: Shared reading positively contributes to narrative development in children with ASD. The NSS revealed distinct narrative challenges, including limited use of internal states and causality.
Clinical Implications: The findings suggest that we should create family-focused reading programs and develop culturally appropriate ways to assess stories to give personalized language help to Arabic-speaking children with ASD. Future research that incorporates larger sample sizes, longitudinal methodologies, and the validation of narrative assessment instruments within Arabic-speaking demographics is imperative.
Participants will be able to:
Understand the interactive impact of reading frequency and reading duration by family members on the narrative macrostructure in Arabic-speaking children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), in order to meet the target for planning tailored interventions.
Identify evidence-based practices to implement family-centered literacy strategies in clinical and educational settings, which will improve narrative skills in children with ASD.
Evaluate the utility of culturally adapted narrative assessment instruments, embrace the Arabic-modified Narrative Scoring Scheme (NSS) as a measure to monitor progress and guide therapeutic choices in ASD interventions.
Personal Narrative Macrostructure in 4-6-year-old Children with Developmental Language Disorder and Typically Developing Peers
Ingrida Balčiūnienė1 & Aleksandr N. Kornev2
1Vytautas Magnus University, 2Saint-Petersburg State Pediatric Medical University
Contact: ingrida.balciuniene@vdu.lt
The proposed paper examines the development of personal narratives in preschool children with developmental language disorder (DLD) compared to their typically developing (TD) peers. The longitudinal study involved 20 Russian-speaking children with DLD and 20 TD children, all approximately 4 years old at the outset. Each participant engaged in three assessment sessions spaced 4–5 months apart, with three meetings per session. To elicit naturalistic personal narratives, we combined the Conversational Map Elicitation Procedure (Peterson & McCabe, 1983) and doll play. During each session, an experimenter’s doll shared a brief personal story and prompted the child to share a similar experience. All sessions were audio-recorded and transcribed using CHAT tools (MacWhinney, 2010), resulting in a corpus of 120 personal narratives. Results indicated that by age four, children from both groups could modify their speech and communicative strategies according to social and situational demands. However, these skills remained influenced by the behavior of their interlocutors. Macrostructural analysis using High Point Analysis (Bliss & McCabe, 2006) revealed that children with DLD predominantly produced simpler narratives—mainly one- or two-event stories—across all assessment waves. In contrast, TD children more frequently produced chronological narratives from the first wave onward. These findings suggest that while basic narrative skills emerge early in both groups, children with DLD tend to produce less complex macrostructural narratives compared to their TD peers. The presentation will further discuss differences between the personal narratives in children with DLD and their TD peers.
Participants will be able to:
Identify key differences in narrative development between preschool children with DLD and their typically developing peers, facilitating more accurate assessment and diagnosis of language impairments.
Understand how macrostructural narrative analysis can inform targeted intervention strategies aimed at enhancing complex storytelling skills in children with DLD.
Apply insights from longitudinal narrative development research to design effective, developmentally appropriate language therapy approaches that support communicative competence in young children with DLD.
Personal Narratives and Multilingual Children in Iceland
Dr. Jóhanna Thelma Einarsdóttir
University of Iceland
Contact: jeinars@hi.is
Introduction: The number of immigrants in Iceland has increased rapidly over the past 25 years, from around 2% to 22% of the population. Icelandic is the primary language spoken by the country's approximately 380,000 inhabitants. The objective of this study was to use the Global Tales protocol to compare language skills and discussion topics between a group of multilingual children and a group of monolingual children.
Methods: The study involved 42 children, including 27 monolingual and 15 multilingual participants, aged 9;3 to 10;9 years. The multilingual children were born in Iceland (all, except one) and had attended Icelandic preschool and primary school.
Results: The results revealed that multilingual children expressed themselves in significantly fewer sentences, used fewer words, and had a less diverse vocabulary compared to their monolingual peers. They also made proportionally more grammatical errors. Both groups frequently discussed happiness derived from spending time with family, recalled instances of conflict or bullying when talking about events that made them angry, and expressed pride in personal accomplishments. Multilingual children more often mentioned school as a concern compared to monolingual children.
Conclusion: These findings indicate that the Global TALES protocol is effective for comparing personal narratives between monolingual and multilingual children. Multilingual children raised in Iceland encounter considerable challenges when using Icelandic to recount personal events from their daily lives.
Clinical Implications: The Global TALES protocol can be effectively used in daily clinical settings. The study also highlights that multilingual children living in Iceland face challenges in learning and using Icelandic.
Participants will learn:
The Global TALES protocol is a valuable tool for observing personal stories in both monolingual and multilingual children.
Children who speak a language other than Icelandic at home encounter linguistic challenges when sharing personal stories, compared to their monolingual peers.
Children speaking a language other than Icelandic at home discuss similar topics as their monolingual counterparts.
Feasibility of Using the Global Tales Protocol to Elicit Personal Narratives in 10-year-old Children in Ireland
Rena Lyons1, Stasha Antonijevic-Elliot1, Sophie Barbotin1, Maeve Molloy1, Mary Pat O Malley-Keighran1, Jessica Spelman1, & Marleen Westerveld2
1University of Galway, 2Griffith University
Contact: rena.lyons@universityofgalway.ie
Introduction: This small-scale study investigated the feasibility of using the Global TALES protocol to elicit personal narratives in typically developing monolingual Irish children, using the online Zoom platform. We analysed children’s performance on measures of productivity (total number of utterances; total number of words) and syntactic complexity (MLU in words). We also reported the topics that children talked about in response to the six prompts in the Global TALES protocol.
Methods: Nineteen typically developing children (6 male, 13 female), aged between 10,0 and 10,11 years participated in the study. The language samples were elicited using the Zoom platform. All stories were transcribed and analysed using Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts software. Qualitative content analysis was used to code the topics of the children’s stories.
Results: Sixteen participants responded to all prompts. One participant responded to three of the six prompts. The prompt that was least successful in eliciting response was the ‘problem’ prompt; 15.7% (n=3) of the children did not provide a response to this prompt. On average, children produced 40 utterances, although individual variability was high. On average, MLU was 8.7, ranging from 6 to 11. Children’s topics were closely aligned with those reported in the Global TALES feasibility study. The most frequent topics were related to family as well as finding or fixing something.
Conclusion: The Global TALES protocol was successful in eliciting personal narratives from 10 year-old Irish English-speaking children.
Clinical implications: Future larger scale studies are now needed to investigate if the results generalise to the wider Irish population with the view of creating local benchmarks of personal narrative performance.
Lyons, R., Antonijevic-Elliott, S., Barbotin, S., Molloy, M., O’Malley-Keighran, M.P., Spelman, J. & Westerveld, M.F. (2023). Feasibility of using the Global Tales Protocol to elicit personal narratives in 10-year-old children in Ireland. Folia Phoniatrica. 75(6), 393–400. https://doi.org/10.1159/000533140
Participants will be able to:
Outline how the Global Tales protocol was used to elicit personal narratives with children in Ireland.
Describe how the children responded to the six Global Tales prompts.
Consider the importance of including personal narratives in assessment.
Untold Stories of Children with Developmental Language Disorder: Narrative Skills and Theory of Mind
Claire Neufeld, Monique Charest, & Pamela Filiatrault-Veilleux
University of Alberta
Contact: cfbernar@ualberta.ca
Introduction: From show-and-tell to writing an autobiography, narratives play a vital role in social interactions, academic outcomes, and self-identity. Constructing and understanding narratives is particularly challenging for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), who demonstrate a persistent language disorder with significant functional impacts on everyday interactions or educational outcomes. Social perception deficits, such as Theory of Mind (ToM), have been associated with narrative abilities in other populations but have not yet been investigated in the context of narration in DLD.
Objectives: This study aims to: (1) describe the personal and fictional narrative skills of children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) in terms of microstructure, macrostructure, mental state verbs and referencing; (2) describe the Theory of Mind (ToM) skills of children with DLD using both direct and indirect measures; and (3) explore the relationship between narrative and ToM skills of children with DLD.
Methods: 40 English-speaking children with DLD (5;0 to 6;11) will undergo a battery of linguistic, cognitive, and functional assessments across two one-hour sessions, including story tasks, standardized tests, and parental questionnaires. Multivariate regression and correlational analyses will be used to examine the link between ToM and narrative skills.
Anticipated Results: It is hypothesized that children with lower ToM scores will produce narratives with reduced verbal productivity, more grammatical errors, simpler story structures, fewer mental state verbs, and less referencing.
Clinical Implications: By focusing on discourse-level skills, this research will contribute to more meaningful assessments and interventions for children with DLD, enhancing their participation in daily life.
Participants will be able to:
Describe key features of personal and fictional narratives in children with DLD and their clinical relevance.
Identify differences in Theory of Mind performance in children with DLD based on assessment type (e.g., indirect vs. narrative-based measures), and consider implications for clinical interpretation.
Discuss how narrative and ToM skills interact in DLD and how this relationship can inform assessment and intervention strategies.
What Do Children in India Talk About? Personal Narratives of Typically Developing Hindi-Speaking Children
Vasundhara Srivastava1, Angel Chan1, & Marleen Westerveld2
1The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 2Griffith University
Contact: vasundhara.srivastava@connect.polyu.hk
Background: The recent development of the Global TALES Protocol provides a unique opportunity to conduct systematic cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparisons of children's personal narratives. This protocol contains 6 scripted prompts to elicit personal narratives in school-age children about times when they experienced feeling happy/excited, worried, annoyed, proud, being in a problem situation, something important.
Objectives: The objectives of this study were to examine the topics of the children's narratives when they responded to the 6 prompts and draw comparisons with the topics of narratives spoken by children from 10 other countries speaking 8 other languages as described in the original feasibility paper.
Methods: We translated the Global TALES Protocol into Hindi and collected personal narratives of thirty Hindi-speaking children (aged 6-9 years), residing in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India. All personal narrative samples were elicited in person and audio recorded for manual coding of the topics.
Results: Although we observed many similarities in the topics of children's personal narratives between this dataset and the dataset reported on in the initial feasibility study, we also documented some novel topics, such as "welcoming guests" in response to the "excited" prompt; "financial problems" in response to the "worried" prompt; "helping someone by actions or by advising someone morally" in response to the "problem" prompt; and "mishap/personal loss" and "exams" in response to the "important" prompt.
Conclusion: Some of these novel topics likely reflected the Indian culture. Because our study involved a group of children who are linguistically and culturally different from previous studies using the Global TALES protocol and, at ages 6-9 years, slightly younger than the 10-year-olds in prior studies, this study adds to the evidence that the Global TALES protocol can be used to elicit personal narratives of children from diverse languages and cultures, as young as age 6.
Participants will understand:
The importance of examining functional aspects of narratives, such as topics, to understand children's experiences and values.
That cultural background influences the topics of children's narratives, with some novel topics emerging that reflect Indian culture.
The feasibility of using the Global TALES protocol to elicit personal narratives from children as young as 6 years old in Indian context.
Telling Personal Narratives: Comparing Stories Told by 10-Year-Old Speakers of Cypriot Greek Dialect and of Standard Modern Greek
Elena Theodorou1, Ioannis Vogindroukas2, Eleni Giannakou1, Lamprini Tsouti3, & Ioannis Phinikettos1
1Cyprus University of Technology, 2Nicosia University, 3University of Ioannina
Contact: eleni.theodorou@cut.ac.cy
Introduction: Cypriot Greek (CG) is the variety of Greek language used for oral communication by the Greek Cypriot people, while Standard Modern Greek (SMG) is the official language. CG differs from SMG in various aspects, including lexicon, phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, and pragmatics.
Objectives: This study examines whether there are differences between children who are native speakers of the CG dialect and those who are native speakers of SMG in narrative measurements obtained in a personal narrative context.
Methods: Thirty-nine ten-year-old children participated in the study. The Global TALES protocol was used to elicit personal narratives across 6 emotion-based prompts. Measures of microstructure (mean length of utterance, number of different words) and macrostructure (plot elements) are examined.
Results: Analysis showed no differences in macrostructure between CG speakers and SMG speakers in response to the prompts. In contrast, group differences were found in syntactic complexity, with the SMG speakers producing longer sentences.
Conclusion: This is the first study to compare the characteristics of personal narratives spoken children who are speakers of CG and SMG. The results from this comparison highlight that children who are speakers of two varieties of the same language share similar narrative elements. However, they may differ in their linguistic profiles, such as in syntax.
Clinical Implications: Understanding the differences between language varieties is vital for researchers, educators, and speech therapists. Familiarity with developmental milestones and the characteristics of each variety enhances clinical and educational practices.
Participants will be able to:
Understand the significance of developing normative data for narrative assessment for children who are dialect speakers.
Learn the differences between Cypriot Greek and Standard Greek.
Recognise the importance of distinguishing between linguistic deviations and linguistic differences, particularly in children who are dialect speakers.
A Systematic Literature Review of Sampling Practices and Analysis of Personal Narratives in Adolescents
Adele Wallis, Marleen Westerveld, & Matthew McKenzie
Griffith University
Contact: adele.wallis@griffithuni.edu.au
Introduction: Personal narratives are an important aspect of adolescent communication and social / emotional development. Despite critical social and emotional developmental tasks that are occurring in this age group, adolescence has received comparatively little attention in relation to personal narratives. It is suspected that, similar to other areas of assessment, there is inconsistency in the terms used in sampling and analysis of personal narratives, contributing to confusion amongst clinicians.
Objective: To conduct a systematic literature review in order to establish a comprehensive overview of the various elicitation tasks and language measures used in sampling and analyzing adolescents’ personal narratives.
Methods: A systematic review of the literature was conducted in accordance with PRISMA statement. Data were extracted to identify methods of elicitation and language measures used in analysis of adolescent personal narratives.
Results: A search of six databases yielded 27 studies meeting criteria. Research objectives encompassed: 1) language development, 2) language performance, 3) psychological functioning. While more than 40 language measures could be cited across these studies, the multiplicity of terms used to name and describe the measures, with wide variation in the constructs they claim to reflect, makes distinctions between measures unclear.
Conclusions: Findings highlight the need for shared understanding of decision-making processes to select most appropriate language measures and consistency in the use of terms for supporting translation of research into clinical practice.
Clinical implications: A taxonomy that names, defines, and describes the various aspects of narrative language measures would create greater clinical utility for assessment of personal narratives.
Participants will be able to:
Have a clear understanding of the wide range of elicitation tasks and language measures used to sample and analyze adolescent language in personal narratives.
Identify some of the underlying considerations in developing elicitation tasks for the assessment of adolescent language.
Identify some of the clinical choices underlying the selection of language measures to analyze and evaluate adolescents’ language performance in personal narratives.
An Initial Analysis of the Personal Narratives of Adolescents With and Without Mental Health Concerns
Adele Wallis, Marleen Westerveld, & Matthew McKenzie
Griffith University
Contact: adele.wallis@griffithuni.edu.au
Introduction: Personal narratives play a critical role in social and emotional developmental tasks of adolescence. This relationship makes this discourse genre ideal for evaluating the language skills of adolescents with mental health concerns (MHC).
Objective: To compare personal narrative performance of adolescents with and without MHC.
Methods: Participants include 20 adolescents (aged 12-17 years) with MHC who all scored in average range on oral subtests of the Test of Adult and Adolescent Language: 4th Edition (TOAL4; Hammill et al., 2007), and 20 age- and gender-matched peers without MHC. All participants were asked to: a) respond to five questions regarding their perceived communication ability; b) provide six personal narratives, using a standard set of elicitation prompts. Personal narratives were combined to form a single language sample and analysed on word- and sentence-level measures of language productivity, language complexity, lexical diversity, and verbal facility.
Results: Results of the communication questions showed a significant group difference, with adolescents with MHC expressing a lower perception of their communication ability than their peers. Adolescents with MHC scored significantly lower on measures of language productivity and language complexity but their performance in lexical diversity was significantly higher than their peers. Results for verbal facility showed lower performance on words per minute, but no group difference for percentage of maze words.
Conclusions: Personal narratives are an effective discourse genre for evaluating and differentiating the language performance of adolescents with and without MHC.
Clinical implications: These language measures effectively differentiate the language performance of adolescents with MHC even when standardised language test results are in the average range. However, their clinical utility in identifying therapy targets requires further consideration.
Participants will be able to:
Have an increased understanding of the language profile of adolescents with mental health concerns.
Identify some of the differentiating features of language performance in the personal narratives of adolescents with and without mental health concerns.
Exploring Personal Narrative Abilities in Monolingual Turkish Children Using the Global TALES Protocol: A Pilot Study
İlknur Maviş1 & Esra Yaşar-Gündüz2
1Association for Turkish Speech and Language Therapists (DKTD), 2Cappadocia University,
Contact: ilknur.mavis@gmail.com
Introduction: Research on personal narratives in Turkey is limited, and there is currently no standardized method for eliciting them.
Objectives: This small-scale study aimed to translate and culturally adapt the Global TALES Protocol into Turkish and to evaluate its usability with two age groups of school-aged children—7 and 10 years old. The study focused on assessing narrative abilities based on verbal productivity (measured by total number of utterances and words), syntactic complexity (mean length of utterance), and semantic diversity (number of different words). Additionally, comparisons were made based on participants’ age and gender.
Methods: The study included 20 monolingual typically developing Turkish-speaking children—10 from each age group (7;0–7;11 and 10;0–10;11). Participants were recruited through personal and social networks. All narrative data were collected online using Zoom.
Results: Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the children's narrative performance, and group comparisons were conducted separately by age and gender. All participants successfully produced narratives in response to the six prompts in the protocol. Moreover, more children responded without needing the scripted follow-up prompts than those who required them. No statistically significant differences were observed between groups based on either gender or age across any of the measured variables.
Conclusion: Findings from this small-scale study indicate that the Turkish translation of the Global TALES Protocol is effective in eliciting personal narratives from Turkish-speaking children.
Clinical implications: The results suggest that the existing instructions are sufficient, and no additional guidance or prompts are necessary. Further research with larger participant groups is recommended to validate these results.
Participants will be able to:
Discuss the clinical utility of culturally adapting standardized narrative assessment tools for use in diverse language populations.
Gain insight into the preliminary findings from the implementation of the Global TALES Protocol with Turkish-speaking children.
Identify key linguistic measures—verbal productivity, syntactic complexity, and semantic diversity—used in evaluating narrative performance in school-aged children and discuss how these measures can inform clinical assessment and intervention planning in speech and language therapy.
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