Personal Narratives of 10-Year-Old Children in Iceland: Verbal Productivity, Word Diversity, and Topics

Abstract

Introduction: The feasibility of using a standard protocol, labelled as the Global TALES, to elicit personal stories was tested across 10 different countries between 2019 and 2021. Personal narratives have not been investigated in Iceland in a similar way. The aim was to explore personal narratives of monolingual children in Iceland by using the Global TALES (2018) protocol to investigate verbal productivity, word diversity, and narrative topics. Methods: Twenty-seven children (ages 9;8 – 10;9) with typical language development produced personal stories in response to six emotion-based prompts contained in the protocol. The children were interviewed by using the Zoom platform because of Covid restrictions. Children’s spoken language was analysed for total number of utterances (TNU), total number of words (TNW), number of different words (NDW), mean length of utterances (MLUw) and proportion of words with grammatical errors. The narrative topics were coded and documented. Results: The measures of verbal productivity showed that there was a large linguistic diversity within the group on all metrics examined. The mean TNU was 62.1 (SD 20.2) utterances, the mean for TNW was 546 (SD 219) words, the mean for NDW was 206 (SD 62) words and the MLUw was 8.6 (SD 1.5) words in an utterance. Despite the variability in spoken language performance around 70-75% of the participants produced TNU, TNW, NDW and MLUw within +/- 1 SD from the mean. The topics of the stories were most frequently related to personal achievement or relationships with the family or friends. Conclusion: The Global TALES (2018) protocol can be used to elicit personal stories in 10-year-old children in Iceland. The results related to verbal productivity and the topics of interest were in line with previous studies around the world.

Evaluating Children’s Personal Narrative Skills Using the Global TALES Protocol: Implications for Practice

“…The first three articles of this special issue report on the feasibility of using the Global TALES protocol with children from Iceland [5], Turkey [6], and Ireland [7]. Despite large individual variability in language productivity and semantic diversity within each language group, all three studies found that all six prompts were successful in eliciting personal narratives from most of the children.…”

“…Despite large individual variability in language productivity and semantic diversity within each language group, all three studies found that all six prompts were successful in eliciting personal narratives from most of the children. Einarsdóttir and Þráinsdóttir [5] reported on 27 ten-year-old Icelandic-speaking children and found that only two children could not provide an answer to one of the six prompts. Maviş and Yaşar-Gündüz [6] assessed ten 7-year-old and ten 10-year-old Turkish-speaking children and reported that all children produced a response to all of the prompts.…”

“…Most of the studies included in this special issue reported on children's structural language skills by counting the number of different words (vocabulary), the total number of words (verbal productivity), and/or the mean length of utterances (syntax) in morphemes or words [6-9, 12, 13]. One study reported on the global coherence of the children's personal narratives [9], using the Narrative Coherence Scoring Scheme [15], whereas four studies reported on the topics and themes of children's responses [5,[10][11][12]. One study investigated children's use of language to convey meaning by coding the use of evaluative devices [14].…”