Abstract

 
 
 This paper presents the Croatian version of the Multilingual Assessment tool for Narratives (MAIN), outlines its development and describes the research that has used it to assess narrative skills in monolingual and bilingual speakers. The Croatian version of MAIN has so far been used in three research projects and results have been presented in five peer-reviewed articles (published or in press) covering a total of 175 children in the age range from 5;0 to 9;0 (20 with developmental language disorder) and 60 adults, age range from 22 to 76. The accumulated results indicate that MAIN can differentiate narrative skills of speakers in distinct age groups and can distinguish children with language disorders form children with typical language development.
 
 
Highlights
This paper presents the Croatian version of the Multilingual Assessment tool for Narratives (MAIN), outlines its development and describes the research that has used it to assess narrative skills in monolingual and bilingual speakers
Narrative assessments can be compared with results on standardized tests across age groups; it can contribute to differentiation between children without language disorders and children with different types of disorders, such as developmental language disorder, language disorders involving primarily pragmatic difficulties, and social communication disorder; and it can provide insights into writing skills
Since the release of the original Croatian version of MAIN in 2012, it has been used in several studies involving monolingual children with or without developmental language disorder and typically-developing bilingual children, carried out within the following three projects: “Adult Language Processing”, funded by the Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ-UIP-2013-112421) and lasting from 2014 to 2017; “Language Dominance of Bilingual Speakers Perceived as Balanced” (LADOBI), co-funded by the Marie Curie Action “Piscopia” and Framework 7 and lasting from 2014 to 2015; and the ongoing “Multilevel Approach to Spoken Discourse in Language Development”, funded since 2018 by the Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ-UIP2017-05-6603)
Summary
MAIN was developed within the Narrative and Discourse Working Group (WG2) of the COST Action IS0804 Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment. The first MAIN manual (Gagarina et al 2012) included preliminary results for 40 monolingual children, half with typical language development and half with developmental language disorder. These results were reported at COST meetings and workshops. An updated version of MAIN and the English version of the manual was released in 2019 (Gagarina et al 2019) It incorporated various changes, correction of minor errors and clarifications in some instructions and tables. This was the base for a new revised Croatian version (2020)
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