A story of stories: a large-scale cross-linguistic study of young children’s narratives

This study investigates children’s narrative skills, using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), a theory-based tool adapted to 100 languages. How do children’s overall narrative skills, including the use of factual and inferred components, and the development of complete episodes, differ across languages and between monolinguals and bilinguals? To answer this, we examined 2608 comparable fictional narratives of 1189 monolingual and bilingual children aged 3-13 years, speaking 33 languages. Children told or retold stories elicited with parallel picture sequences. Narratives were analyzed for inclusion of five essential story components (internal states as initiating events, goals, attempts, outcomes, internal states as results), overall narrative structure, use of factual and inferred information, and presence of complete episodes. Monolinguals initially outperformed bilinguals, but bilinguals’ narrative skills developed more rapidly and eventually surpassed those of monolinguals, with all children performing better in story retelling than storytelling, especially in their L2. Across languages, children were more likely to produce factual components (outcomes/attempts) than inferred ones (internal states/goals). The likelihood of producing a complete narrative increased with age; monolinguals consistently outperformed bilinguals, even under stricter coding criteria. Patterns of use for factual and inferred components were consistent across languages, suggesting universal strategies in narrative development.