Peer-reviewed article

Children's Oral Narrative Skills Through the Lens of Internal State Terms: A Large-Scale Study of Fictional Stories Elicited With the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives.

Natalia Gagarina, Ute Bohnacker, Manuel Bohn, Sharon Armon-Lotem, Dato Abashidze et al. · 28 Sept 2026

Abstract

PURPOSE: This article investigates the development of oral narrative skills in children through the lens of internal states in a large cross-linguistic data set of comparable fictional stories. METHOD: In a joint effort of research groups around the world, 5,507 picture-based stories were elicited from 2,763 monolingual and bilingual typically developing (TD) children aged 3-13 years in 32 countries across 44 languages with the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN; Gagarina et al., 2019). These were transcribed and coded for internal state terms (ISTs) that express story characters' thoughts, emotions, and perceptions. Using generalized mixed models, we investigated the likelihood of a child producing ISTs in the stories, as influenced by age, monolingualism versus bilingualism, and, for bilinguals, first language versus second language, elicitation mode (telling vs. retelling), IST type, story type, and story length. RESULTS: We found strong positive effects of age and elicitation mode (retelling) on IST production, but no differences between monolinguals and bilinguals or for bilinguals in their two languages. Children were far more likely to produce ISTs as initiating events than ISTs as reactions. Story length only predicted IST production in younger children, but not in older ones. CONCLUSIONS: As shown by this large-scale sample, children's skills in making explicit the internal states of characters in fictional stories develop substantially during the primary school years, across languages, and for both monolingual and bilingual learners. The robust facilitative effect of retelling suggests that retelling may be particularly suitable to use with MAIN when researchers/clinicians are interested in assessing a child's ability to verbalize internal states. Future research should examine ISTs in children with developmental disorders and explore their application in intervention. SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.33857551.