Department of Speech-Language Pathology, Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia.
Postgraduate doctoral study "Speech, Language and Hearing Disorders," Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia.
Folia Phoniatr Logop. 2023;75(6):412-430. doi: 10.1159/000533399. Epub 2023 Aug 7.
Personal narratives are monological stories based on a personal experience that help children explain and understand their emotional states, as well as process positive and negative experiences. The aim of this study was to identify age- and emotion-related traits of lexical and grammatical abilities and coherence of personal stories produced by school-aged children between 7 and 13 years.
A total of 60 typically developing children, speakers of Croatian, were stratified into three groups according to age. Using the Global TALES protocol, each child was asked to produce six personal stories prompted by different emotional states. The personal narratives were analysed using measures of lexical diversity (lemma-token ratio and number of different words), productivity (total number of words), and syntactic complexity (mean length of utterances and clausal density). Based on the Narrative Coherence Coding Scheme, three coherence dimensions (context, chronology, and theme) were rated.
Age group was shown to explain 18% of the variance in the ability to produce personal narratives. Personal narratives elicited through positive prompts were overall more lexically diverse but were significantly less elaborated chronologically and thematically than negative and neutral narratives.
This study showed that coherence of the produced stories was connected with the child's lexicon and that both variables - lexicon and coherence - were influenced by emotional valence of the story. In contrast, grammatical aspects of the narrative were influenced only by age. Finally, it is possible to state that the Global TALES protocol is sensitive enough to capture specificities of creating personal stories, both developmental ones and those created under the influence of the emotional valence of the prompts.
个人叙事是基于个人经历的独白故事，有助于儿童解释和理解他们的情绪状态，并处理积极和消极的经历。本研究的目的是确定 7 至 13 岁学龄儿童所产生的个人故事的词汇和语法能力以及连贯性的年龄和情绪相关特征。
共有 60 名发育正常的克罗地亚语母语者儿童按照年龄分为三组。使用全球 TALES 方案，要求每个孩子用不同的情绪状态提示产生六个个人故事。使用词汇多样性（词干-令牌比和不同词汇数）、产词量（总词汇数）和句法复杂性（平均话语长度和从句密度）等指标分析个人叙事。根据叙事连贯性编码方案，对三个连贯性维度（语境、时间顺序和主题）进行评分。
年龄组解释了 18%的个人叙事能力差异。通过积极提示产生的个人叙事在词汇上更加多样化，但在时间顺序和主题方面明显不如消极和中性叙事详细。
本研究表明，所产生故事的连贯性与儿童的词汇有关，并且这两个变量（词汇和连贯性）都受到故事情绪的影响。相比之下，叙事的语法方面仅受年龄影响。最后，可以说全球 TALES 方案足够敏感，可以捕捉个人故事创作的特殊性，包括发展方面和受提示情绪影响的方面。
