Background: Stroke is a worldwide leading cause of disability, and around 50 million people are affected by stroke annually. Public stroke educational and awareness programmes can make a great deal of difference. Young children are in key position to seek urgent medical care if grandparents suffer a stroke, as grandparents are often their secondary caretakers. Objective: The objective of the current study was to design an educational intervention targeting children and, in parallel, directly involve extended family members. Design: Participatory action research. Setting: School-based education stroke intervention in Thessaloniki, Northern Greece. Methods: Over the course of 5 weeks, this intervention sought to educate 66 preschool children and their families through a series of novel activities that revolved around 4 superheroes, the FAST mnemonic and a medical emergency number. One superhero and their unique superpower was introduced every week through a Powerpoint presentation, a short animation video and a wide range of in-class and take-home activities, such as ‘phantom speech’, role-playing, funny face mimicking games, and rhyming poems. Children were also encouraged to identify their own family superhero so as to transfer their learning to real life. Results: Follow-up individual and group assessment pointed to encouraging results. Results from odd-one-out-tasks revealed that children were able to recognise the stroke symptoms in question. However, they performed more poorly on more complex tasks involving recall. Conclusions: Preschool children acquired knowledge of stroke symptoms which appears more solid when recognition is assessed. Assessment tasks involving substantial recall of information do not necessarily reflect the ability to detect stroke symptoms.

Prosodic patterns of speech appear to make a critical contribution to memory-related processing. We considered the case of a previously unexplored prosodic feature of Greek storytelling and its effect on free recall in thirty typically developing children between the ages of 10 and 12 years, using short ecologically valid auditory stimuli. The combination of a falling pitch contour and, more notably, extensive final-syllable vowel lengthening, which gives rise to the prosodic feature in question, led to statistically significantly higher performance in comparison to neutral phrase-final prosody. Number of syllables in target words did not reveal substantial difference in performance. The current study presents a previously undocumented culturally-specific prosodic pattern and its effect on short-term memory.

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This volume contains ten papers that report on recent developments and new language versions of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). Eight papers describe a MAIN language version, including the typological characteristics of the language, the cultural context in which the language is used, and the processes of translating and adapting MAIN to the language. Some also present results from pilot studies or summaries of already published studies where the language version was used. The two final papers report on research conducted with MAIN, and discuss important methodological issues, for example concerning different elicitation methods.

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.