Bilingual Multicultural Services, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA.
Progress Speech-Language Clinic, Taichung City, Taiwan.
Folia Phoniatr Logop. 2023;75(6):431-446. doi: 10.1159/000533559. Epub 2023 Aug 25.
PURPOSE/INTRODUCTION: Narrative language skills are critical for effective social interactions and academic success. Consequently, narratives are regularly an aspect of assessment and intervention for children with communication impairments, supporting the need for information about typical development from children across cultures. Development of coherent personal narratives is associated with growth of both one's individual identity and cultural identity which are linked to psychological well-being. The topics and contents of children's personal stories can provide insight into cultural influences on what children consider important, how they interpret experiences, and their values and beliefs, which in turn contribute to their developing individual and cultural self-identity. The purpose of this study was to investigate the topics and content of personal narratives told by typically developing 10-year-old children from East Asian and Western English-speaking cultures.
There were 20 children in each of three East Asian language groups - Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean; and 62 children in the English-speaking groups (22 in the USA and 20 each in the Australian and New Zealand groups). In each group, half were boys and half were girls. Children responded to prompts from the Global TALES protocol to elicit personal narratives. All language samples were transcribed, translated, and coded for topic choices using qualitative content analysis in collaborative discussions by the four authors, who included an English-speaking author from the USA (C.E.W.), and three authors, who are native speakers of the three East Asian languages, Mandarin (K.-M.C.), Cantonese (A.M.-Y.W.), and Korean (J.P.L.).
Results on topics in stories from East Asian and Western English-speaking cultures are described in relation to literature on anthropology. English-speaking children and East Asian children in this study talked about similar topics in their personal narratives, but the frequency of these topics within their stories varied. Possible explanations for differences in story topics are discussed within a framework on cultural dimensions.
Evaluation of the topics of children's personal narratives provides insight into what is important to the children and the way they view their worlds. This information may inform clinical approaches to assessment and intervention with children with communication impairments, encouraging clinicians to go beyond analysis of language structure to consider multiple factors that influence communicative competence.
目的/引言：叙事语言技能对于有效的社交互动和学业成功至关重要。因此，叙事通常是评估和干预语言障碍儿童的一个方面，这也支持了从跨文化的儿童群体中获取有关典型发展信息的需求。连贯的个人叙事的发展与个体身份和文化身份的成长相关，而这两者都与心理健康有关。儿童个人故事的主题和内容可以深入了解文化对儿童认为重要的事物、他们如何解释经验以及他们的价值观和信仰的影响，而这些又反过来影响他们发展个人和文化自我认同。本研究的目的是调查来自东亚和英语为母语的西方文化的典型发展的 10 岁儿童讲述的个人叙事的主题和内容。
每个东亚语言群体（普通话、粤语和韩语）各有 20 名儿童，英语为母语的群体（美国 22 名，澳大利亚和新西兰各 20 名）各有 62 名儿童。每个群体中，男孩和女孩各占一半。孩子们对来自全球 TALES 协议的提示做出反应，以引出个人叙事。所有语言样本都经过转录、翻译，并使用定性内容分析进行主题选择编码，该分析由四位作者共同讨论完成，其中包括一位来自美国的英语母语作者（C.E.W.），以及三位东亚语言的母语者，他们是普通话（K.-M.C.）、粤语（A.M.-Y.W.）和韩语（J.P.L.）的母语者。
本研究描述了来自东亚和英语为母语的西方文化的故事主题结果，并与人类学文献进行了比较。本研究中，英语为母语的儿童和东亚儿童在个人叙事中讲述了类似的主题，但这些主题在他们的故事中的出现频率有所不同。在文化维度框架内，讨论了故事主题差异的可能解释。
对儿童个人叙事主题的评估可以深入了解对儿童重要的事物以及他们看待世界的方式。这些信息可能为语言障碍儿童的评估和干预提供信息，鼓励临床医生不仅要分析语言结构，还要考虑影响交际能力的多种因素。
