Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
Research Centre for Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience (RCLCN), The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
Folia Phoniatr Logop. 2023;75(6):447-455. doi: 10.1159/000534298. Epub 2023 Sep 30.
The recent development of the Global TALES Protocol provides a unique opportunity to conduct systematic cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparisons of children's personal narratives. This protocol contains 6 scripted prompts to elicit personal narratives in school-age children about times when they experienced feeling happy/excited, worried, annoyed, proud, being in a problem situation, something important.
The objectives of this study were to examine the topics of the children's narratives when they responded to the 6 prompts and draw comparisons with the topics of narratives spoken by children from 10 other countries speaking 8 other languages as described in the original feasibility paper.
We translated the Global TALES Protocol into Hindi and collected personal narratives of thirty Hindi-speaking children (aged 6-9 years), residing in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India. All personal narrative samples were elicited in person and audio recorded for manual coding of the topics.
Although we observed many similarities in the topics of children's personal narratives between this dataset and the dataset reported on in the initial feasibility study, we also documented some novel topics, such as "welcoming guests" in response to the "excited" prompt; "financial problems" in response to the "worried" prompt; "helping someone by actions or by advising someone morally" in response to the "problem" prompt; and "mishap/personal loss" and "exams" in response to the "important" prompt.
Some of these novel topics likely reflected the Indian culture. Because our study involved a group of children who are linguistically and culturally different from previous studies using the Global TALES protocol and, at ages 6-9 years, slightly younger than the 10-year-olds in prior studies, this study adds to the evidence that the Global TALES protocol can be used to elicit personal narratives of children from diverse languages and cultures, as young as age 6.
全球 TALES 协议的最新发展为系统地进行跨语言和跨文化的儿童个人叙事比较提供了独特的机会。该协议包含 6 个脚本提示，以引出学龄儿童关于他们感到快乐/兴奋、担心、烦恼、自豪、处于问题情境、重要事情的个人叙事。
本研究的目的是检查儿童对 6 个提示做出反应时的叙事主题，并与最初可行性研究中描述的来自 10 个其他国家、使用 8 种其他语言的儿童的叙事主题进行比较。
我们将全球 TALES 协议翻译成印地语，并收集了 30 名讲印地语的儿童（年龄在 6-9 岁之间）的个人叙事，他们居住在印度北方邦的瓦拉纳西。所有个人叙事样本均由个人引出，并进行音频记录，以便对主题进行手动编码。
尽管我们观察到本数据集和最初可行性研究报告的数据集中儿童个人叙事的主题有许多相似之处，但我们也记录了一些新的主题，例如对“兴奋”提示的“欢迎客人”；对“担忧”提示的“财务问题”；对“问题”提示的“通过行动或通过道德建议帮助他人”；对“重要”提示的“不幸/个人损失”和“考试”。
其中一些新主题可能反映了印度文化。由于我们的研究涉及一群在语言和文化上与使用全球 TALES 协议的先前研究不同的儿童，而且年龄在 6-9 岁之间，比之前研究中的 10 岁儿童略小，因此这项研究增加了证据表明，全球 TALES 协议可以用来引出来自不同语言和文化的儿童的个人叙事，年龄小至 6 岁。
