Tell me a story about that! Assessing language abilities of 10-year-old Danish-speaking children using the Global TALES protocol

Abstract

Introduction: Personal narratives make up 50% of children’s daily conversations. They affect social-, emotional-, cognitive-, and linguistic skills which in time has an impact on education and career opportunities and are therefore important for a success-ful development. Despite the importance of personal narratives children’s language abilities are often assessed using standardised norm-based tests. Fictional narratives and story retelling have been used to supplement standardised testing. However, these types of narrative assessment do not assess the child’s spontaneous language. A newly developed international research project called the Global TALES (GT) protocol was created to capture children’s personal narratives using six prompts eliciting narratives from different emotions. The current study is the first study investigating personal nar-ratives of Danish-speaking children elicited by the GT protocol. The aim of the study was to investigate the feasibility of the GT protocol for Danish typically developed children and to investigate and compare Danish children’s language abilities (via measures of microstructure) with what has been reported for children acquiring other languages. Furthermore, the study investigated the children’s social cognitive abilities (using evaluative devices, self-efficacy beliefs, and Theory of Mind) as well as language abilities using a standardised test aiming to investigate associations between these abili-ties and language abilities elicited from the GT protocol. Method: 20 typically developed 10-year-old Danish-speaking children (14 girls and six boys, age: 9;11 to 11;1) produced personal narratives elicited from the GT protocol. The Formulated Sentences subtask from CELF-IV was used as a standardised measure for productive language. Six additional prompts were piloted to elicit emotionally self-conscious narratives. The children rated their self-efficacy beliefs using the General Self-Efficacy Scale and were lastly presented with six false belief stories from the Happé Strange Stories task. Results: The GT protocol successfully elicited narratives from the children and indi-vidual variability was high. Results from the microstructure analysis showed that the average TNU was 47.3, TNW was 544.5, MLU was 11.32, and NDW was 187.55. Differences were present between the original GT prompts and the emotionally self-conscious prompts, favouring the former. There were no significant differences be-tween positive and negative prompts in relation to microstructure. However, use of ED’s was higher when talking about emotionally negative experiences. Results from the FS task correlated with MLU, but not with other language measures. Use of ED’s correlated with TNU, TNW, and NDW, while only EMOT-words correlated with SE and SS scores. Conclusion: The GT protocol can successfully be used to elicit personal narratives from TD Danish-speaking 10-year-olds. Results of microstructure and use of ED’s are comparable to results from existing literature of children speaking other languages. Emotionally self-conscious prompts can additionally be used to elicit personal narra-tives in this age group and should be investigated in different age groups. Future re-search should investigate differences between language assessed via spontaneous lan-guage use (GT) and standardised norm-based tests to determine the most effective tools for assessing language abilities.

A master thesis from Aalborg University

Tell me a story about that! Assessing language abilities of 10-year-old Danish-speaking children using the Global TALES protocol