The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN): Adding Cantonese to MAIN

Chan, Angel; Cheng, Kelly; Kan, Rachel; Wong, Amy; Fung, Richard Y. K.; Wong, Janice W S; Cheng, Tiantao; Cheung, Amelie; Yuen, Karen Wing Yee; Chui, Barbie; Lo, Joyce; Gagarina, Natalia

doi:10.21248/zaspil.64.2020.553

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…The study also capitalizes on the methodological and theoretical strengths of MAIN, using the newly adapted Urdu and Cantonese versions of MAIN to conduct dual language assessment (Gagarina et al, 2019a,b;Chan et al, 2020;Hamdani et al, 2020;Kan et al, 2020). Our research questions are:…”

Section: Current Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Oral narratives were elicited using Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN; Gagarina et al, 2019) adapted to Cantonese (Gagarina et al, 2019a;Chan et al, 2020) and Urdu (Gagarina et al, 2019b;Hamdani et al, 2020). Unlike other narrative assessment tools, MAIN is uniquely designed for dual language assessment in bilinguals.…”

Section: Materials Tasks and Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Story telling in bilingual Urdu−Cantonese ethnic minority children: Macrostructure and its relation to microstructural linguistic skills

Chan

Chen²,

Hamdani³

et al. 2023

Front. Psychol.

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IntroductionThe ability to produce a well-structured, coherent and informative narrative requires the integration of lexical and grammatical skills at different levels of complexity. Investigating how narrative macrostructure competence is predicted by microstructural linguistic skills is conceptually enlightening; yet there have been very few, if any, studies documenting the associations between macrostructure and microstructure in both languages of the same bilinguals. In this paper we attempt to address this research gap and report on the first empirical study of Urdu-Cantonese bilingual children’s narrative abilities, bringing in data from a new language pair that is currently understudied.MethodsTwenty-four bilinguals (mean age = 9.17 years) acquiring Urdu as first, family and heritage minority language, and Cantonese as second, school and majority language were assessed via Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). We examined these children’s macrostructural competence and its relations to microstructural skills in both languages (Urdu and Cantonese). Three macrostructure components were scored as response variables: Story Structure (SS), Story Complexity (SC), Internal State Terms (IST). Four microstructural measures were scored as predictor variables: number of different words (NDW), mean length of Communication Units (MLCU), proportion of grammatical Communication Units (Gproportion), proportion of correct connectives linking the major episodic elements (Cproportion).ResultsIn regression analyses, NDW emerged consistently as a positive predictor of SS, SC and IST in both languages. MLCU and NDW were positive predictors of SS in the stronger L1, but NDW was the only positive predictor of SS in L2. By contrast, NDW and an index of syntactic competence (MLCU in L1, but Cproportion in L2) were significant or close-to-significant positive predictors of SC in both languages. NDW was the only positive predictor of IST in both languages. These findings suggested that the relationships between narrative macrostructure and specific microstructural abilities could manifest both similarly and differently between L1 and L2.DiscussionWe discuss the findings by considering the unique nature of each macrostructure component and how each component might be related to specific microstructural linguistic skills. We suggest directions for further research and discuss how the current findings bring deeper implications for educators and clinicians in assessment, pedagogy, and intervention.

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Section: Current Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Materials Tasks and Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Story telling in bilingual Urdu−Cantonese ethnic minority children: Macrostructure and its relation to microstructural linguistic skills

Chan

Chen²,

Hamdani³

et al. 2023

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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Sentence Repetition as a Clinical Marker for Mandarin-Speaking Preschoolers With Developmental Language Disorder

Wang

Zheng

Lin

et al. 2022

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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Purpose: Sentence repetition (SR) is believed to be a clinical marker for developmental language disorder (DLD) across many languages. This study explored the potential of a self-designed Mandarin SR task (MSRT) to reflect Mandarin-speaking preschoolers' language ability and to differentiate children with and without DLD in this population. Furthermore, we aimed to compare five scoring systems for evaluating children's MSRT performance. Method: In Study 1, the MSRT was administered to 59 typically developing (TD) children aged 3;6 (years;months) to 6;5 in China. The task was examined regarding its ability to correlate with language indices derived from children's narrative samples. In Study 2, both a TD and a DLD group were recruited to investigate the task's sensitivity, specificity, and likelihood ratios to distinguish between children with and without DLD. Results: Study 1 showed that, using four of the five scoring methods, TD children's performance on the MSRT significantly correlated with all the language measures derived from narratives. Study 2 showed that the MSRT was able to differentiate children with and without DLD. Conclusion: The MSRT is a promising tool to reflect language abilities and identify DLD in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers. Based on the current evidence, we recommend that researchers and clinicians select the number of errors in the syllable method or the binary method when scoring responses to meet their specific needs. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.19386257

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Systematic language input improved productions of elaborated verb phrases of Cantonese-speaking children with language difficulties

Lau

Tang

Wong

et al. 2023

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics

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The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN): Adding Cantonese to MAIN

Cited by 6 publications

References 12 publications

Story telling in bilingual Urdu−Cantonese ethnic minority children: Macrostructure and its relation to microstructural linguistic skills

Story telling in bilingual Urdu−Cantonese ethnic minority children: Macrostructure and its relation to microstructural linguistic skills

Sentence Repetition as a Clinical Marker for Mandarin-Speaking Preschoolers With Developmental Language Disorder

Systematic language input improved productions of elaborated verb phrases of Cantonese-speaking children with language difficulties

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