Telling Personal Narratives: Comparing Stories Told by 10-Year-Old Speakers of Cypriot Greek Dialect and of Standard Modern Greek

Abstract

Introduction: Cypriot Greek is the variety of Greek language used for oral communication by the Greek Cypriot people, while Standard Modern Greek is the official language. Cypriot Greek differs from Standard Modern Greek in various aspects, including lexicon, phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax and pragmatics. This study examines whether there are differences between children who are native speakers of the Cypriot Greek dialect and those who are native speakers of Standard Modern Greek in narrative measurements obtained in a personal narrative context. Methods: Thirty-nine ten-year-old children (19 Cypriot Greek speakers and 20 Standard Modern Greek speakers) 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 macro-structure (plot elements) are examined. Results: Analysis showed no differences in macrostructure between Cypriots Greek speakers and Standard Modern Greek speakers in response to the prompts. In contrast, group differences were found in syntactic complexity, with the Standard Modern Greek speakers producing longer sentences. Discussion/ Conclusion: This is the first study to compare the characteristics of personal narratives spoken by 10-year-old children who are speakers of Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek. The results from this initial 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. Understanding these differences is important for researchers, educators, and speech therapists. A detailed understanding of developmental milestones and a clear understanding of each variety's characteristics are crucial from a research, pedagogical, and speech-therapy perspective.

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

“…Children Speaking Nonmainstream Dialects Accurate identification of language disorders is often difficult in children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, including children who speak nonmainstream dialects. As reported in this special issue, Theodorou et al [8] found group differences in syntactic ability when investigating the personal narratives of children speaking different varieties of Greek (Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek dialect), with the children speaking Cypriot Greek dialect producing shorter sentences. These results are consistent with prior research in showing how dialect use may impact children's spontaneous language skills and highlight the importance of considering a child's dialect use when assessing language ability to avoid misidentification of language difference as language disorder.…”

“…Theodorou et al [8] investigated differences in personal narrative performance between groups of 10-yearold children who speak two varieties of the same language: Standard Modern Greek and Cypriot Greek Dialect. Children's personal narratives were analysed at both macrostructure (overall structure and inclusion of elements) and microstructure (verbal productivity, semantic diversity, and syntactic complexity) levels.…”

“…The Global TALES protocol has been successfully administered face to face [4,8,9,11] or via Zoom [6,7,10,12]. However, some subtle differences in performance were found between the assessment conditions, particularly for the Arabic-speaking children [12], and further research is needed to better understand why the assessment condition may influence some children's performance more than others.…”