Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 15, 2025

Assessing the Coherence of Parents' Short Narratives Regarding their Child Using the Five-Minute Speech Sample Procedure
Published on: September 19, 2019
What Do Children in India Talk About? Personal Narratives of Typically Developing Hindi-Speaking Children
Vasundhara Srivastava1,2, Angel Chan1,2,3, Marleen F Westerveld4
1Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
Background:
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.
Objectives:
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.
Methods:
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.
Results:
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.
Conclusion:
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.
More Related Videos
10:11Portable Intermodal Preferential Looking IPL: Investigating Language Comprehension in Typically Developing Toddlers and Young Children with Autism
Published on: December 14, 2012
06:15Using the Visual World Paradigm to Study Sentence Comprehension in Mandarin-Speaking Children with Autism
Published on: October 3, 2018
Related Concept Videos
Language Development
The critical period for language acquisition suggests that the ability to acquire language is at its peak early in life. As people age, this proficiency decreases. Language development begins very...
Socioemotional Experience and Gender Development
Socioemotional Development during Infancy
Primary Temperament Types
Influence of Parents and Peers on Identity
Parental Influence on Identity Development
Parents serve as primary guides and managers in an adolescent's life, offering support instrumental in decision-making and personal growth....
Parenting Styles
Authoritarian Parenting
This style is strict and controlling, with little room for open dialogue. Authoritarian parents demand obedience and often enforce rules with minimal warmth. Children raised this way may lack social skills and initiative, usually comparing themselves to others unfavorably.
Authoritative...
Piaget's Stage 1 of Cognitive Development