Opportunities and challenges in the analysis of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN)

Cécile De Cat

doi:10.1177/01427237211064695

Abstract

The development of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) has no doubt contributed to prompting a renewed interest in children’s narratives. This carefully controlled test of narrative abilities elicits a rich set of measures spanning multiple linguistic domains and their interaction, including lexis, morphosyntax, discourse-pragmatics, as well as various aspects of narrative structure, communicative competence, and language use (such as code-switching). It is particularly well suited to the study of discourse cohesion, referential adequacy and informativeness, and of course to the study of narrative structure and richness, and the acquisition of a more formal or literary register. In this commentary article, I reflect on the five empirical papers included in the special issue. I focus on methodological challenges for the analysis of narratives and identify outstanding questions.

Highlights

Tests from the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem et al, 2015) have become widely used to assess key aspects of bi/multilingual children’s language, across a large number of languages. It has been a catalyst for greater comparability across studies focusing on typical and atypical language development in bi/multilingual children, and increasingly in monolingual children
The advent of one such test, the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), has no doubt contributed to prompting a renewed interest in children’s narratives in recent years. This carefully controlled test of narrative abilities elicits a rich set of measures spanning multiple linguistic domains and their interaction, including lexis, morphosyntax, discourse-pragmatics, as well as various aspects of narrative structure, communicative competence, and language use
An even more parsimonious account of the overuse of D elements in Polish would, I suggest, not involve cross-linguistic transfer affecting syntactic representation: the overuse of pronominal elements in the narratives could be a manifestation of the child intentionally encoding referentiality on discourse-pragmatic grounds

Summary

Introduction

Tests from the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem et al, 2015) have become widely used to assess key aspects of bi/multilingual children’s language, across a large (and ever growing) number of languages. Its semi-spontaneous nature allows a relative amount of freedom to the narrator, yielding insights into lexical richness, syntactic complexity, as well as morphosyntactic accuracy and fluency The articles in this special issue focus on the following aspects: The discourse appropriateness of referential expressions in reference introduction (Lindgren et al, 2020) and reference maintenance (Andreou et al, 2020) or in both (Fichmann et al, 2020; Hržica & Kuvač Kraljević, 2020); The impact of cross-linguistic influence on referential choices (Lindgren et al, 2020; Otwinowska et al, 2020); The impact of cross-linguistic influence and of DLD on morphosyntactic accuracy and referential choices (Andreou et al, 2020; Fichmann et al, 2020); The impact of gender-based ambiguity on the choice of NP versus pronoun (Hržica & Kuvač Kraljević, 2020); Developmental effects in the encoding of new information by young bilinguals (Lindgren et al, 2020). I focus on methodological challenges for the analysis of narratives and identify outstanding questions

Discourse appropriateness

Individual variation

Final remarks